After All, the trains are MORE dangerous. Anyone, Anywhere can derail a train and kill most everyone. By not drawing attention to this, maybe terrorists will focus on the much harder task of killing airline passengers.
There is no reason that the rail passenger needs less protection than the airline passenger. Hmmm, that can't mean we are going overboard on security in our airports, it must be that our train stations, subways and buses need more security? Yes, the next thing you know, we will need travel documents to move around our own cities. Welcome to the USaSR!
I appreciate your encouraging people to get a licence, but, they should not go for the licence unless they seriously love to fly.
Yes, the OLD plane will cost you the same as a SUV, but the annual inspection costs are way high. Oh ya, and you have to replace the engine every 1500 - 2000 hours. Oh, and you have to fly regularly or you can't take passangers with you, oh, and a medical every 2 years (actually depends on age). Oh ya, did you know that the regulations are constantly changing, and if you mess up the least bit, you are either dead, or the FAA takes your licence(they do that VERY fast). There are many places that you can no longer just fly at will. If you want to go anywhere at any time, you had better spend a LOT more effort and get an IFR licence. Did I mention the huge effort to get the private licence in the first place. The cost is the easy part.
No, it is easier to go to your local (FBO) Airport, and pay some young pilot to fly you somewhere. He needs the hours, so the costs will not be unbelieveable. (If it is not a commercial pilot, you cannot pay more than your share of the trip)
Since it will be an open source project on Source Forge, I am not very fearfull about some big plot to embrace, extend and Extinguish(it can be forked or whatever). I think MS really needs this plug in to gain sales in the long term. There are many places that will adopt ODF where there will be individuals and departments that are MS fans. Now they can come up with some reason that they have to have MS Office and cut the cheque themselves.
Here at work I am encouraging the switch to ODF, and plugin's like this will allow MS to keep playing for all our desktops, even if we switch to ODF.
You are right, him dying is not justice. For what he did, being sent to the Gulag would still not be justice.
He absolutely ruined tens of thousands of lives, taking away the ENTIRE life savings. These people cannot get another life to earn it back, it is gone... I can think of no punishment that would be severe enough.
I think AMD would have to be feeling very insecure before they pulled this move. They have always been very good at leaving room for partners, and not squeezeing them out.
Remember, AMD pulls out of the chipset market any time they can to make room for the partners.
Even though this story seems to have "lots of legs", I still do not see it.
The Cyrix designs still exist today, it was bought by Via. So, there are at least 2 other x86 processors, Via's line, and the Transmeta design (fabbed by NEC?). Also, the Power designs are NOT dead, Xbox 360(xenon)? Cell? Power 5? And maybe the Cell is this new design that you are talking about that would be so innovative
Lets pretend that there are only AMD and INTC for a second. Well, you don't seem to need a third competitor as desperately in the semiconductor game. Another example is NVIDIA and ATI, no love lost between them, and they compete like mad dogs.
As an aside, I really belive transmeta gets the credit for forcing Intel to address power consumption and come out with the Pentium M. I think the INTC managment would have ignored the design otherwise(after all, it really was just a tweaked P3, and they really believed netbust would rule)
I tried your Sirius, and the sound quality was not there. I think the frequency limited FM stations even sound better than some of that low bitrate junk. Maybe XM is better, I should at least check them out.
I was at JavaOne in San Fran last week, so I was talking to a Motorola rep and telling him that I just wanted a simple sleek phone that did nothing but phone. (and download addresses from my computer) He basically laughed me out of the booth. He looked at me like I was a loon, and told me that the extra features don't take more space, and there is no market for it.
I think the handset makers are getting scared and think if they ignore us, we will eventually get addicted to feature rich phones. I just wish that the R&D went into shrinking them further, not into feature creep.
(with that said, there was a new java phone there that I would use for our sales force, we could put some nice apps on there, but this is a blackberry replacement really)
The only thing that is absurd are the statements that people like MR B.C. make once they sell out completely. It is amazing the contortions we put our reasoning through (and truely believe) when there is financial gain involved.
We are willing to spend Billions to keep the worlds oil supply "free", but we are willing to devote a mere 10 Million for this?
Kudos to the people who dug up the 10 million, it was likely hard work! But it does show that the priorities of the Government as a whole are off base.
If only the government had spent all the cash that it cost to for the gulf war, but used it on rebates for ultra energy efficent vehicles, and rebates on insulating homes. It would have kept the money at home, working in the economy instead of being exported to Oil rich nations, and certainly reduce the "shortage" of oil.
The government will want to make an example of them so next time everyone will obey. Then next time quest asks permission for something...DENIED!! Or the IRS will audit the heck out of them
OK, so I had to choose whether to mod parent down(+4, Interesting)???, or inject some reason into the thread. A tough decision!!!
Unlike Open Source projects Apple has to do a lot of regression testing and QA
OK, the previous post is sounding a bit like fanboi apologetics(or a troll). Any software that is going to be upgraded needs QA. Bugs do not give Open Source software a free ride. Do NOT believe the the BSD or Linux guys ignore regression and QA testing anymore than any commercial vendor. I write for a commercial company, and end up doing too much testing(in my opinion), but we don't pump out code near as solid as the BSD or GNU/Linux guys. They obviously do a LOT of testing.
If Apple took the Linux approach, OS X would run...five filesystems... and would be hated by typical users for the brief time Apple was around
You cannot convince me that most Apple users feel that having a variety of filesystems (which are transparent) would make them hate the OS. I would like to give more credit to the user base than that.
I was just talking about this to the City Manager in Tuttle, and he claimed that the Open Source QA testing was so good because "these freaks have nothing better to do". (ok, I wasn't, I just wanted to laugh at Tuttle, but it would explain the quality)
You are right, they can use the excuse for anything they want! There was a defense contractor using a patented invention for a waterproof connector for use in high pressures(if I remember correctly). He spent years perfecting it, and helping them, then when it was time to pay, they said TOO BAD, WE DON'T HAVE TO PAY. He sued, but they did not have to provide any proof they were or were not using it because the government stepped in and said that it might reveal state secrets.
He was screwed and basically got nada last I knew.
Oh ya, the company was Lucent(lucifer?) technologies and relates to underwater connectors for fiber optics(Wanna bet they have tapped into every undersea fiber there is?).
YOUR COMMENTS WERE SOOOO GOOD, SO INSIGHTFULL AND CONCISE. I loved reading it SO much!
Then your tag line is an ADVERTISEMENT for a company that is part of the whole DRM/DMCA thing.
I personally think twice about advertising for a company for free.(let them do it, computing platforms are not religion, it is about getting a job done). But then to advertise for a company that is opposed to what you stand for?
I am confused.
P.S. Please be kind, this is not flamebait, and I really think this was the best post I'd read in this thread!
Granted, but it is VERY easy to do, and it is the first thing you do when you are behind and are willing to trade profit for getting a faster product out the door. AMD has not needed to use sparse fabrication resources on this, as they have had a commanding lead. I imagine if they become concered about the FX series not dominating, they will produce some large cache chips. With fab 36? having more wafer starts, larger wafers, and some being on a smaller process and having Chartered fab some as well, I can see AMD FINALLY being able to throw wafer space at cache.
It is nice to see Intel finally competing with competent designs, but most of the recent "noise" about Conroe seems more like Intel marketing then educated and objective excitement.
I guess I am not a fanboi either as I have both AMD and INTC PC's at home. But I admit, since the demise of the P3, I have tried to avoid buying INTC as needlessly burning electricity goes against my grain(my home fileserver runs nicely on a passively cooled P2).
No question, I think they finally have a good core. It seems that the wider execution path, and improved branch prediction make up for the lack of on die memory controller. That is a feat.
The first tests that I have seen put it on an almost even footing with the A64 when the cache is not a factor. I cannot wait for more tests so we can see more details.
You are right, even a nice cache could not save the netburst chips from Athlon 64 domination, but it sure did help save face anyway.
Yep, Intel is the Fab king, so if anyone can get away with a large cache it is them. At the same time, wafer size is money, and they are hurting on the profits (by analysts standards, not mine), so you know they would love to drop the cache sizes if they could get away with it. Also, they were claiming to be capacity constrained for the last half a year I believe. So much so, they were sending Motherboard OEM's to other chipset manafacturers because they couldn't produce in sufficent volumes.
All this leaves me a bit confused, because it seems like they have a lot of low end cpu's floating around in the channel at firesale prices.(mind you these are small cache, small die) But maybe this is just an attempt to pull down AMD's Average Selling Prices (ASP) on the desktop at the expense of some of thier other business.
All I know it that when Intel shows this great new Conroe, and the cache size on the initial units is 4MB, It makes me wonder if they even believe they have a superior product. If they believed that, they would have a 1 MB cache - take the profit and run. (we will see, maybe I am wrong)
Early indications are that Intel's architechtural improvements with Conroe will give them a significant edge over AM2 chips, even though AMD still has an on-die memory controller and Intel doesn't.
Actually, early indications seem to indicate that it stomps the Athlon when everything fits in the massive L1 Cache, but the "architechtural improvements" you talk about only bring it up to parity without the gigantic cache. (anyone can add cache, it is an expensive move that you only make if you really need the performance)
That Anand "preview" was in a very controlled situation, we really need to read more than ONE article before we decide who is king, and that Conroe will be superior to AM2
Fine, and I can show you an article that says the 65nm Athlons will clock 40% faster, and the conroe is actually slower if you don't fit in the 4Meg L1 cache. (anyone can add cache)
Why don't we wait 6 months and then start trash talking, when we have actual products.
One of two things has happened
1. AMD has become complacent and has no strategy of really updating a now old product this year. In this scenario they were lulled asleep.
2. Intel has stunk so bad that AMD has been holding some cards close to the chest because it did not need to play them.
No staged demo by either AMD or Intel will give us the answer, but we will know in 6-8 months.
There is not a single drive make that does not go bad once in a while. At least Seagate supports the drive for what - 5 years??? So that $100 (2 months ago? you need to find a better place to shop) is not wasted.
I also bought a deskstar in 2000 or 2001, and I am now on my forth. This last one they sent me has actually lasted 3 years now, so even IBM/Hitatchi is finally making a more reliable product.
In summary, Having the old Deskstar die was almost guaranteed, and even a Seagate drive will fail once in a while. So, I don't think there is really a trend here. Mechanical devices like drives will always be the most failure prone part of the PC.
It is a nice idea, but the truth is a bit plainer.
The Canadians has just been a little more fortunate in that it has been a lot harder to funnel $$$ to politicians, so the multinationals have had a harder time taking over the legislatures.
The other thing is that the news media up north is far less myopic. If you travel abroad for any length of time, you notice a LOT of news stories that are not carried in the US. Not by the left wing media, not by FOX. The media focus keeps the masses focused on ideas that are acceptable to the big media companies.
I thought this was commonly known or assumed. Is this news to many people?
I thought that the only reason the P4 had not been totally abandoned already was that it takes time to switch directions in such a massive company. (and with so many partners that design around your product)
I don't care what any link says. When I was in elementary school (70's and early 80's) they preached the coming ice age. They also taught that we had 10 years of oil, and that food from the sea could feed everyone in the world if we would just eat more of it!
I am not saying we should not cut back on oil, we should!
I am saying that "they" don't have a clue what they are talking about, and now "they" are revising history.
A unloaded hard drive in not as much an invitation to pirate as it is to EXPEREMENT! Maybe that is what microsoft fears
I have a coworker who after watching us order componants and build our own PC's, go excited an ordered his own. With his former Dell, that he always felt uneasy about messing with the partition, but that new empty drive was just BEGGING to be played with, so he installed Ubuntu today.
I don't know if he will stick with it, but the chances are good as he is not a gamer. But even if he does not, Linux has mindshare between his ears, and he is not afraid of it anymore.
You Ubuntu people will be interested to know that it is your free cd's with shipping that made him pick your distro. (I am a KDE guy, so it was not me, lol)
Slashdot Mirror
This is one time I give the Govenment credit.
After All, the trains are MORE dangerous. Anyone, Anywhere can derail a train and kill most everyone. By not drawing attention to this, maybe terrorists will focus on the much harder task of killing airline passengers.
There is no reason that the rail passenger needs less protection than the airline passenger. Hmmm, that can't mean we are going overboard on security in our airports, it must be that our train stations, subways and buses need more security? Yes, the next thing you know, we will need travel documents to move around our own cities. Welcome to the USaSR!
I appreciate your encouraging people to get a licence, but, they should not go for the licence unless they seriously love to fly.
Yes, the OLD plane will cost you the same as a SUV, but the annual inspection costs are way high.
Oh ya, and you have to replace the engine every 1500 - 2000 hours.
Oh, and you have to fly regularly or you can't take passangers with you, oh, and a medical every 2 years (actually depends on age).
Oh ya, did you know that the regulations are constantly changing, and if you mess up the least bit, you are either dead, or the FAA takes your licence(they do that VERY fast).
There are many places that you can no longer just fly at will. If you want to go anywhere at any time, you had better spend a LOT more effort and get an IFR licence.
Did I mention the huge effort to get the private licence in the first place. The cost is the easy part.
No, it is easier to go to your local (FBO) Airport, and pay some young pilot to fly you somewhere. He needs the hours, so the costs will not be unbelieveable. (If it is not a commercial pilot, you cannot pay more than your share of the trip)
Good solid point. The whole patent thing is lurking in the shadows for this and any open source software.
If the project was accepted by source forge, would it not have to be under an acceptable licence (one that allows for re-distrubution/forking)?
Since it will be an open source project on Source Forge, I am not very fearfull about some big plot to embrace, extend and Extinguish(it can be forked or whatever). I think MS really needs this plug in to gain sales in the long term. There are many places that will adopt ODF where there will be individuals and departments that are MS fans. Now they can come up with some reason that they have to have MS Office and cut the cheque themselves.
Here at work I am encouraging the switch to ODF, and plugin's like this will allow MS to keep playing for all our desktops, even if we switch to ODF.
You are right, him dying is not justice. For what he did, being sent to the Gulag would still not be justice.
He absolutely ruined tens of thousands of lives, taking away the ENTIRE life savings. These people cannot get another life to earn it back, it is gone... I can think of no punishment that would be severe enough.
I think AMD would have to be feeling very insecure before they pulled this move. They have always been very good at leaving room for partners, and not squeezeing them out.
Remember, AMD pulls out of the chipset market any time they can to make room for the partners.
Even though this story seems to have "lots of legs", I still do not see it.
Just my $.02 on your law of 3's comment
The Cyrix designs still exist today, it was bought by Via. So, there are at least 2 other x86 processors, Via's line, and the Transmeta design (fabbed by NEC?). Also, the Power designs are NOT dead, Xbox 360(xenon)? Cell? Power 5? And maybe the Cell is this new design that you are talking about that would be so innovative
Lets pretend that there are only AMD and INTC for a second. Well, you don't seem to need a third competitor as desperately in the semiconductor game. Another example is NVIDIA and ATI, no love lost between them, and they compete like mad dogs.
As an aside, I really belive transmeta gets the credit for forcing Intel to address power consumption and come out with the Pentium M. I think the INTC managment would have ignored the design otherwise(after all, it really was just a tweaked P3, and they really believed netbust would rule)
I tried your Sirius, and the sound quality was not there. I think the frequency limited FM stations even sound better than some of that low bitrate junk. Maybe XM is better, I should at least check them out.
I was at JavaOne in San Fran last week, so I was talking to a Motorola rep and telling him that I just wanted a simple sleek phone that did nothing but phone. (and download addresses from my computer)
He basically laughed me out of the booth. He looked at me like I was a loon, and told me that the extra features don't take more space, and there is no market for it.
I think the handset makers are getting scared and think if they ignore us, we will eventually get addicted to feature rich phones. I just wish that the R&D went into shrinking them further, not into feature creep.
(with that said, there was a new java phone there that I would use for our sales force, we could put some nice apps on there, but this is a blackberry replacement really)
The only thing that is absurd are the statements that people like MR B.C. make once they sell out completely. It is amazing the contortions we put our reasoning through (and truely believe) when there is financial gain involved.
We are willing to spend Billions to keep the worlds oil supply "free", but we are willing to devote a mere 10 Million for this?
Kudos to the people who dug up the 10 million, it was likely hard work! But it does show that the priorities of the Government as a whole are off base.
If only the government had spent all the cash that it cost to for the gulf war, but used it on rebates for ultra energy efficent vehicles, and rebates on insulating homes. It would have kept the money at home, working in the economy instead of being exported to Oil rich nations, and certainly reduce the "shortage" of oil.
The government will want to make an example of them so next time everyone will obey.
Then next time quest asks permission for something...DENIED!!
Or the IRS will audit the heck out of them
OK, so I had to choose whether to mod parent down(+4, Interesting)???, or inject some reason into the thread. A tough decision!!!
...five filesystems ... and would be hated by typical users for the brief time Apple was around
Unlike Open Source projects Apple has to do a lot of regression testing and QA
OK, the previous post is sounding a bit like fanboi apologetics(or a troll).
Any software that is going to be upgraded needs QA.
Bugs do not give Open Source software a free ride. Do NOT believe the the BSD or Linux guys ignore regression and QA testing anymore than any commercial vendor. I write for a commercial company, and end up doing too much testing(in my opinion), but we don't pump out code near as solid as the BSD or GNU/Linux guys. They obviously do a LOT of testing.
If Apple took the Linux approach, OS X would run
You cannot convince me that most Apple users feel that having a variety of filesystems (which are transparent) would make them hate the OS. I would like to give more credit to the user base than that.
I was just talking about this to the City Manager in Tuttle, and he claimed that the Open Source QA testing was so good because "these freaks have nothing better to do". (ok, I wasn't, I just wanted to laugh at Tuttle, but it would explain the quality)
You are right, they can use the excuse for anything they want! There was a defense contractor using a patented invention for a waterproof connector for use in high pressures(if I remember correctly). He spent years perfecting it, and helping them, then when it was time to pay, they said TOO BAD, WE DON'T HAVE TO PAY. He sued, but they did not have to provide any proof they were or were not using it because the government stepped in and said that it might reveal state secrets.
He was screwed and basically got nada last I knew.
Oh ya, the company was Lucent(lucifer?) technologies and relates to underwater connectors for fiber optics(Wanna bet they have tapped into every undersea fiber there is?).
YOUR COMMENTS WERE SOOOO GOOD, SO INSIGHTFULL AND CONCISE. I loved reading it SO much!
Then your tag line is an ADVERTISEMENT for a company that is part of the whole DRM/DMCA thing.
I personally think twice about advertising for a company for free.(let them do it, computing platforms are not religion, it is about getting a job done). But then to advertise for a company that is opposed to what you stand for?
I am confused.
P.S. Please be kind, this is not flamebait, and I really think this was the best post I'd read in this thread!
And yet not everyone does... :rolleyes:
Granted, but it is VERY easy to do, and it is the first thing you do when you are behind and are willing to trade profit for getting a faster product out the door. AMD has not needed to use sparse fabrication resources on this, as they have had a commanding lead. I imagine if they become concered about the FX series not dominating, they will produce some large cache chips. With fab 36? having more wafer starts, larger wafers, and some being on a smaller process and having Chartered fab some as well, I can see AMD FINALLY being able to throw wafer space at cache.
It is nice to see Intel finally competing with competent designs, but most of the recent "noise" about Conroe seems more like Intel marketing then educated and objective excitement.
I guess I am not a fanboi either as I have both AMD and INTC PC's at home. But I admit, since the demise of the P3, I have tried to avoid buying INTC as needlessly burning electricity goes against my grain(my home fileserver runs nicely on a passively cooled P2).
No question, I think they finally have a good core. It seems that the wider execution path, and improved branch prediction make up for the lack of on die memory controller. That is a feat.
The first tests that I have seen put it on an almost even footing with the A64 when the cache is not a factor. I cannot wait for more tests so we can see more details.
You are right, even a nice cache could not save the netburst chips from Athlon 64 domination, but it sure did help save face anyway.
Yep, Intel is the Fab king, so if anyone can get away with a large cache it is them. At the same time, wafer size is money, and they are hurting on the profits (by analysts standards, not mine), so you know they would love to drop the cache sizes if they could get away with it. Also, they were claiming to be capacity constrained for the last half a year I believe. So much so, they were sending Motherboard OEM's to other chipset manafacturers because they couldn't produce in sufficent volumes.
All this leaves me a bit confused, because it seems like they have a lot of low end cpu's floating around in the channel at firesale prices.(mind you these are small cache, small die) But maybe this is just an attempt to pull down AMD's Average Selling Prices (ASP) on the desktop at the expense of some of thier other business.
All I know it that when Intel shows this great new Conroe, and the cache size on the initial units is 4MB, It makes me wonder if they even believe they have a superior product. If they believed that, they would have a 1 MB cache - take the profit and run. (we will see, maybe I am wrong)
Early indications are that Intel's architechtural improvements with Conroe will give them a significant edge over AM2 chips, even though AMD still has an on-die memory controller and Intel doesn't.
Actually, early indications seem to indicate that it stomps the Athlon when everything fits in the massive L1 Cache, but the "architechtural improvements" you talk about only bring it up to parity without the gigantic cache. (anyone can add cache, it is an expensive move that you only make if you really need the performance)
That Anand "preview" was in a very controlled situation, we really need to read more than ONE article before we decide who is king, and that Conroe will be superior to AM2
Fine, and I can show you an article that says the 65nm Athlons will clock 40% faster, and the conroe is actually slower if you don't fit in the 4Meg L1 cache. (anyone can add cache)
Why don't we wait 6 months and then start trash talking, when we have actual products.
One of two things has happened
1. AMD has become complacent and has no strategy of really updating a now old product this year. In this scenario they were lulled asleep.
2. Intel has stunk so bad that AMD has been holding some cards close to the chest because it did not need to play them.
No staged demo by either AMD or Intel will give us the answer, but we will know in 6-8 months.
There is not a single drive make that does not go bad once in a while. At least Seagate supports the drive for what - 5 years??? So that $100 (2 months ago? you need to find a better place to shop) is not wasted.
I also bought a deskstar in 2000 or 2001, and I am now on my forth. This last one they sent me has actually lasted 3 years now, so even IBM/Hitatchi is finally making a more reliable product.
In summary, Having the old Deskstar die was almost guaranteed, and even a Seagate drive will fail once in a while. So, I don't think there is really a trend here. Mechanical devices like drives will always be the most failure prone part of the PC.
It is a nice idea, but the truth is a bit plainer.
The Canadians has just been a little more fortunate in that it has been a lot harder to funnel $$$ to politicians, so the multinationals have had a harder time taking over the legislatures.
The other thing is that the news media up north is far less myopic. If you travel abroad for any length of time, you notice a LOT of news stories that are not carried in the US. Not by the left wing media, not by FOX. The media focus keeps the masses focused on ideas that are acceptable to the big media companies.
I thought this was commonly known or assumed. Is this news to many people?
I thought that the only reason the P4 had not been totally abandoned already was that it takes time to switch directions in such a massive company. (and with so many partners that design around your product)
Sorry
I don't care what any link says. When I was in elementary school (70's and early 80's) they preached the coming ice age. They also taught that we had 10 years of oil, and that food from the sea could feed everyone in the world if we would just eat more of it!
I am not saying we should not cut back on oil, we should!
I am saying that "they" don't have a clue what they are talking about, and now "they" are revising history.
A unloaded hard drive in not as much an invitation to pirate as it is to EXPEREMENT! Maybe that is what microsoft fears
I have a coworker who after watching us order componants and build our own PC's, go excited an ordered his own. With his former Dell, that he always felt uneasy about messing with the partition, but that new empty drive was just BEGGING to be played with, so he installed Ubuntu today.
I don't know if he will stick with it, but the chances are good as he is not a gamer. But even if he does not, Linux has mindshare between his ears, and he is not afraid of it anymore.
You Ubuntu people will be interested to know that it is your free cd's with shipping that made him pick your distro. (I am a KDE guy, so it was not me, lol)