I have somehow missed movie downloads being legal over there, do you have some link with information? (a search on copyright law does not seem to reveal anything special).
Well, except that the original code-base was released by Sun and most of the development is still done by Sun employees. I would very much say that it is Sun's OpenOffice in the same way it was Netscape's Mozilla back in the day.
Seems this one is the old Geode GX (says so in the linked spec), which is not only clocked to a mere 400 MHz, it does not manage terribly good IPC at that rate either. I have no idea how AMD is planning to sucker anyone into buying these.
That one is a good example of what I were talking about. It is actually a component of Visual Studio 2002 that causes the flaw, it was patched by service pack 1 several weeks before the exploit. It could also be triggered by Office XP installing the VS component, but then only if the user manually moved system DLL's around to cause IE to load them (it would normally not). So the flaw was fixed before an exploit was found. Not to mention that the exploit is in a software product that is far more rare than IE (especially since VS2002 has long since been replaced by VS2003).
Pardon, but rather than using this exploit as some kind of evidence that Firefox is on-par, security-wise, with IE, shouldn't we be viewing this as a victory for the patch/version-release cycle of the Mozilla foundation?
Maybe so, it is just something of a double standard since it has been qutie a long time since Windows or IE had an exploit predating the the patch for it. Either way it is of course a really bad thing to have security holes, and the attempts to spin these things in favor of Firefox are a bit annoying. Tons of people here take shots at the Microsoft security initiative, but they kind of miss that while Microsoft announces security problem after security problem they have the last year announced them with patches, before an exploit has been found. Most exploits have in fact been done by reverse-engineering patches.
Not saying that you are necessarily doing such things, but the explosion of complaints about Firefox following these announcements as of late is probably mostly a reaction against the double standards that a lot of people on Slashdot maintain.
I already answered this above, but for completeness sake:
I were a bit unclear, they can disable ActiveX as a web distributed component technology. That is also the only problematic kind, the local pre-distributed or plugin-installed ActiveX-controls have no security problems as such (they of course have complete control, but that is of course expected for plugin programs and features of the browser as such). ActiveX the component technology is not really problematic for code that you trust anyway, having signed ActiveX controls downloaded from the net be arbitrarily trusted was the stupid idea.
Unless I misremind myself there is also straighforward ways to disable controls from the net but allow local plugins and core components to run just fine. Which is really all one can ask for.
But there is no problem with ActiveX as a component technology at all, the problem is just with ActiveX-components from untrusted parties (the internet). Disable having IE be able to directly run external ActiveX components and the problem is solved, things like Acrobat Reader being an ActiveX component is not an issue in any way.
I can agree that I were unclear, ActiveX as a web technology can be thrown out (that is, the on the web installable signed controls), and that is the problematic kind. Using ActiveX as a clientside plugin and component architecture does not matter any more than using say CORBA.
I have more faith in Microsoft engineering than most of Slashdot, including you. I will however, since we are so deep in the replies here that few people will ever read it admit this: I don't believe that Microsoft will pull this off in a good way. It will probably be more limited than the idea would dictate is good. But I like to bring it up on Slashdot now and then anyway since I believe that bringing up things that Microsoft is doing right but the OSS equivalents aren't doing yet makes it a small bit more likely that someone will pick it up and work on it sooner or later:)
Also of course since I hate the Slashdot attitude that Microsoft are stupid and OSS developers can walk on water. But but, I'll leave that for another day.
I think we basicly agree then. I am hoping that Microsofts stuff turns out well since it will then immediately get picked up elsewhere. I am not going to use IE7 (there probably wont be a Solaris port anyway), but I can still appreciate something that could mean some progress in making applications secure and reliable.
Something that is not true though is that I have a deep enough understanding of the actual workings of IE7. What I "know" I have picked together from the IE team blog and some MSDN papers. There is a very real risk that they might end up implementing something significantly worse than this. Even if they end up botching it I do however believe that functionality to allow properly working desktop applications to run different parts of their functionality in differently restricted ways will show up in Linux and friends sooner or later. It is just too good an idea to leave behind.
This is where I do have proof. All those security patches for IE? Yeah, design flaw. It's not an arms race to fight off the hackers at the gate because you wrote effective, stable software. It's an arms race to fight off the hackers at the gate because you wanted to lock Netscape and friends out of the browser industry by making ActiveX mildly attractive and highly proprietary / dangerous to work in due to its features which were promised but under-tested. Or badly designed. Take your pick.
ActiveX is not a big part of the bugs or of a poor design. It is just a misfeature. Microsoft could overnight throw out ActiveX and be in the same position as Firefox when it comes to those controls, as such it is not a fundamental design flaw. On the other side of the coin: ActiveX is a bad idea in practice. It is not due to Microsoft bugs or flawed design, it is just a fundamentally flawed idea since application developers deploy stupid things and users do stupid things. Microsoft has mae moves to improve the situation, demoting the ActiveX confirmation dialog to be a right-click option on the "popup"-bar in SP2 was a move in the right direction for instance.
You mean like Unix? What an innovation!
...
Microsoft has been behind in security design for over a decade. I was working in Unix, which is capable of doing the things you're calling revolutionary, when I was in junior high a full uhm.... Longer than I want to think about... ago. Everything is a file and files have - while not a perfect permissions system - at least something which is designed for multi-user and therefore easily modifiable to multi-permission. Call BS all you want, but M$ has a lot of spaghetti code in your computer....
Sure it is something. But it is not used well in desktop applications (applications can all write to your home directory with your session startup scripts and so, wreck your data or whatever else they please). One could run them as dummy users that can't write to your home directory, but that'd make for an extremely confusing and inconvenient application. One could with some care and a whole lot of dummy users and setuid scripts copying things about in intelligent ways create the same kind of security model that Microsoft are doing for IE7. Problem is that it isn't a very good design and more importantly; no one appears to be doing it.
Even if possible it does not help if no one does it, and even if it gets done it will not be as nice as Microsofts framework that utilizes the much better security model provided by NT. Now, as I said, if it works out for Microsoft there will no doubt be some movement to get something going on Linux as well, but credit where credit is due. Microsoft is doing something interesting here.
This is one of those classic arguments. The problem is that these are not actually compelling reasons for end users. Which was my main interest here.
This might of course to some part be because I consider the W3C to push through way too many way too complex standards at a way too high rate. How did we arrive at SVG really? A 750 page specification to manage to make vector drawings?
To some part I thought sanity would increase as Javascript became a deeply integrated web-standard, making a vector image format as simply javascript instance with some nice drawing primitives (basicly adopting the postscript model) would have been so much simpler that it isn't even funny. I guess it would have missed the big XML paradigm, but who is actually going to transform an SVG image with XSLT or whatever while serving pages?
But but, getting off-topic; you are in principle right, but it is not an end-user consideration.
Remember the age of the code though, how long has IE been around as compared to firefox. I would expect that about 6 years of sniffing thru firefox will result in less exploits that the amount thats still found in IE
Which to me read as "Firefox may have many exploits now, but in six years it'll be way better than IE". I would consider Firefox the better browser, I just argued about that guys post.
Interestingly I really don't know if I'd pick IE or Firefox first security-wise. A year ago it would have been a no-brainer; Firefox; however Microsofts security push really has stepped things up a fair bit. We get to know most problems because the update shows up, SP2 really straightened a lot of things out. They also seem to have some nice plans for IE7. Overall Microsoft security has improved greatly.
Still: Firefox has at least as good security and has more compelling features.
Except then Firefox will not get developed to as high a level as IE has and will never reach that point. Note that this observer has the same problem as most observers who say, "It's better!" And that problem is that the numbers aren't exactly fairly proportioned. An IE hack that gives someone access to all your 'net data then wipes your entire hard drive is counted as one bug, as is a firefox flaw that gives someone access to your last ten sites viewed. That's a biased and unfounded example, but the reality stands regardless - THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO DO A SECURITY STUDY.
Right, I don't really buy this study either. I were just stating that if one says that Firefox is worse now one can't argue that people should switch. Also, sure, if people switch over in masses the development effort will go faster, but this was not really about what was best for Firefox, but what is best for the user now.
There's piles of things wrong with IE, they're just not user-visible all the time and that is a main portion of the problem's gestalt.
This is one that shows up over and over, that IE's basic design is flawed. Which is, as far as I can tell, unfounded. All the external interfaces and architecture seems clean and nice enough, and since I (and I would guess; you) have no way to look at the source I can't say that we have any reason to believe that the IE source is in a bad state.
You can lock Firefox down if you want. Won't be able to see EVERYTHING, but it will definitely be secure. Not quite anywhere near as true with IE.
This does not say anything meaningful, it is true that if one keeps removing things sooner or later one will have removed all bugs. The point is to have a working browser with as good security as possible.
You can do this in linux. Natively. Just make yourself a different user with no rights to do certain things. Try that in Windows and see if it works for you. As to the, "Microsoft will solve everything in the end" mentality, well, I can't really argue with that.
This one I am actually a bit tired of, but I'll go over what has impressed me with what Microsoft is doing for Vista and IE7:
This is not a process-level permission thing (which would wreck the way the application works, you need to be able to save files, change settings and so on for it to be a sane desktop application). Rather Microsoft is finally getting around leveraging and extending the rather advanced and fine-grained NT security model for something. The basic idea is that most of the application runs with very restricted permissions and can launch subcomponents like a download or settings panel that have a higher level of permission. This is set on a very fine-grained level. There is no need to have separate components, nor is it all-or-nothing, a component can have access to specific system calls according with specific parameters, they may change only some given parts of the registry and so on.
Now this is not new as such. It is however leveraging well-known and well-implemented security technology to make a desktop application simultaneously relativly locked down but still as usable as it would be running at full permissions in all parts. It is not limited to IE7 either but there is supposed to be new tools and libraries to make it easy to take advantage of for new applications. As I said, Linux will have this real quick if it works out nicely. There are better security models for Linux already implemented and running in specialized distributions, they would no doubt be brought into mainline is they appear useful.
You're looking at it the wrong way. Microsoft is behind and has been so for a very long time. The stuff you want is part of the problem with their occasional 'buy instead of implement' business model.
This I call bullshit, we don't know the actual state of the IE code but I can't say that I see any reason why it should be bad. What Microsoft did do
If this is so it just leads to the question: Why should people use Firefox now then? Lets wait until 2010 when it will actually be better and stick to IE which is better now.
I don't really believe in this, but arguing like that is arguing against Firefox.
My personal opinion on these things is: People care way too much about browser religion. Let people use IE, not that much wrong with it. Both IE and Firefox are huge complex applications processing huge amounts of diverse untrusted data. Sure it'd be great if they were secure, but it is just not happening that way yet.
There might be some hope on the horizon with low-rights IE7. It might be that it really does manage to remove the impact of the bugs, which is really the best case scenario as things stand. If so we will no doubt see similar approaches integrated in Linux desktops and see Firefox refactored to use the same approach.
I had somehow missed the Sempron64 creeping down in price as of late, so it is again true. I based the statement on the situation a while back when the original Sempron was the "real" low-end and the Sempron64 mostly ended up competing with the low-end Athlon64 instead. I'll take back my statements about Intel's budget line (though it sure is a whole lot more lively today than it used to be). This is also why I made the 64bit'ness a point, even if Intel's EM64T stuff isn't exactly great on the NetBurst it is a decent addition. Overall my post would have actually been insightful, quite some time ago:)
I still don't think the laptop is the whole story, it is quite likely that Intel has something good lined up for the desktop next generation. After a very long battle with the Netburst Intel engineers are finally set free on a somewhat less extreme archictecture. I would expect some pretty damn good stuff out of Intel for the next generation.
True that the Sempron64 has taken a great dive in price as of late. I based my statement of way too old information I guess (when the "original" Sempron was still the basic solution). I take back my statement about Intel on the budget end.
This is a somewhat interesting statement since it is probably true. Sure Apple is unlikely to ever make a computer based on the P4, but lets look at the facts in AMD vs. Intel:
Sure, AMD holds the top-end. Not by an all that huge margin (say 20% on average to be generous) compared to how CPU wars have played out in the past. While AMD has gone from being the absolutely clear bang-for-the-buck manufacturer with the K7 to being the top-end holder with the K8 however Intel has really improved the rest of their product lines. A much overlooked chip today is the (new) Celeron D. 64-bit capable, solid performance, rock-bottom price. I would personally say that Intel offers better budget solutions at the moment.
Other than that however, I have said it before and I'll say it again; Intels desktop Pentium M roadmap can no doubt look great. The Pentium 4 did not work out as they wanted, but Intel has a lot of great engineers (just look how well the Pentium 4 has carried on competing despite the setbacks the design has seen), when they with the next big iteration are freed from the old P4 there will no doubt be a lot of interesting stuff coming from Intel.
Another interesting point is that Intel really is the only CPU maker that actually does more than one product-line at once. AMD kept the K7 around for a budget-line and stripped down the K8 a bit for laptops, but Intel has not just two, but actually three current designs ongoing (the P4, the Itanium and the Pentium M). An Intel roadmap may also contain a lot of goodies directly deriving from the fact that they have the design manpower to actually work on more than one path at once.
It is an open well-understood standard with a lot of support in the community and a variety of implementations (with varying degrees of completeness granted) are avilable. The OSS rubber-stamp might not be the most important thing here.
Knowing that there is nothing special of interest in a new console (the xbox 360 and PS2) is a lot less exciting than not knowing what will happen with another. So I think "excited" is a good word here. It does not however imply that one should think that it is a sure buy or anything.
To me at least the things we know about the Revolution is that the hardware will be roughly similar to the xbox 360 in the common metrics (give or take 50% it is the same basic CPU, memory and graphics technology). However there is still the possibility that Nintendo has something up its sleeve that might make this generation actually interesting.
I don't want to be one of the grumpy old people complaining about new things, but really, this generation seems to be a very incremental improvement. In some areas even a step back since no console will have a harddrive in their basic configuration. While one can surely upgrade to one of the new ones it is more or less like moving from a GeForce FX to a 7000-series on the PC; you'll get the same basic thing, just a bit more of it.
Don't compare this to the PSX -> PS2 step, sure it just added more power, but the difference is that the PSX were too weak for a lot of gameplay possibilities. There does not seem to be much new gameplay possibilities on the PS3 as of yet (though I'd love to be proven wrong), just a bit more polish and glitz.
SQLite is a great piece of software, especially since it does not really matter what the desktop as such thinks about things, an application can easily deploy it itself and it'll work great. On the other hand PostgreSQL would fare better as a central repository, allowing many applications to deal with the same data simultaneously (something that SQLite supports flawlessly, but with very poor parallel performance since it uses file-locking to do it).
With PostgreSQL behind the scenes one could take advantage of a myriad of really nice PostgreSQL features in a interprocess way. In fact, it could very well be used to replace a lot of old infrastructure in the desktop systems in a more robust and uniform way. Think triggers and listeners and so on for tons of nice IPC, use in-memory tables for volatile operations and get flawless performance. But pretty much foremost: Think excellent robustness and integrity.
I am very happy to see SQLite really bring a lot of nice database features to the people in a very easy to use way, I would however really like to see a global database process with a known "system schema" replace and enhance a lot of functionality already in desktop systems. Pretty much all functionality that changes any persistent state would be well served to go through a database at some point (even if it is a file that will be kept by the underlying filesystem there are things like recently-used lists, and maybe some triggers would be useful, and so on).
But but, time will tell. Will be interesting at any rate.
Something Awful. OMGWTFBBQ is the nick of an administrator on the SA forums (he has also run some frontpage features at one time or other). No doubt the general "idea" is not unique, but these particular variations are with very little doubt directly due to his nickname.
He is apparently more than a bit annoyed with having his name turn into an overused catchphrase.
Slashdot Mirror
I have somehow missed movie downloads being legal over there, do you have some link with information? (a search on copyright law does not seem to reveal anything special).
Well, except that the original code-base was released by Sun and most of the development is still done by Sun employees. I would very much say that it is Sun's OpenOffice in the same way it was Netscape's Mozilla back in the day.
Seems this one is the old Geode GX (says so in the linked spec), which is not only clocked to a mere 400 MHz, it does not manage terribly good IPC at that rate either. I have no idea how AMD is planning to sucker anyone into buying these.
Have a look at the advisory yourself.
Maybe so, it is just something of a double standard since it has been qutie a long time since Windows or IE had an exploit predating the the patch for it. Either way it is of course a really bad thing to have security holes, and the attempts to spin these things in favor of Firefox are a bit annoying. Tons of people here take shots at the Microsoft security initiative, but they kind of miss that while Microsoft announces security problem after security problem they have the last year announced them with patches, before an exploit has been found. Most exploits have in fact been done by reverse-engineering patches.
Not saying that you are necessarily doing such things, but the explosion of complaints about Firefox following these announcements as of late is probably mostly a reaction against the double standards that a lot of people on Slashdot maintain.
I were a bit unclear, they can disable ActiveX as a web distributed component technology. That is also the only problematic kind, the local pre-distributed or plugin-installed ActiveX-controls have no security problems as such (they of course have complete control, but that is of course expected for plugin programs and features of the browser as such). ActiveX the component technology is not really problematic for code that you trust anyway, having signed ActiveX controls downloaded from the net be arbitrarily trusted was the stupid idea.
Unless I misremind myself there is also straighforward ways to disable controls from the net but allow local plugins and core components to run just fine. Which is really all one can ask for.
I can agree that I were unclear, ActiveX as a web technology can be thrown out (that is, the on the web installable signed controls), and that is the problematic kind. Using ActiveX as a clientside plugin and component architecture does not matter any more than using say CORBA.
Also of course since I hate the Slashdot attitude that Microsoft are stupid and OSS developers can walk on water. But but, I'll leave that for another day.
Something that is not true though is that I have a deep enough understanding of the actual workings of IE7. What I "know" I have picked together from the IE team blog and some MSDN papers. There is a very real risk that they might end up implementing something significantly worse than this. Even if they end up botching it I do however believe that functionality to allow properly working desktop applications to run different parts of their functionality in differently restricted ways will show up in Linux and friends sooner or later. It is just too good an idea to leave behind.
ActiveX is not a big part of the bugs or of a poor design. It is just a misfeature. Microsoft could overnight throw out ActiveX and be in the same position as Firefox when it comes to those controls, as such it is not a fundamental design flaw. On the other side of the coin: ActiveX is a bad idea in practice. It is not due to Microsoft bugs or flawed design, it is just a fundamentally flawed idea since application developers deploy stupid things and users do stupid things. Microsoft has mae moves to improve the situation, demoting the ActiveX confirmation dialog to be a right-click option on the "popup"-bar in SP2 was a move in the right direction for instance.
You mean like Unix? What an innovation!
Microsoft has been behind in security design for over a decade. I was working in Unix, which is capable of doing the things you're calling revolutionary, when I was in junior high a full uhm.... Longer than I want to think about... ago. Everything is a file and files have - while not a perfect permissions system - at least something which is designed for multi-user and therefore easily modifiable to multi-permission. Call BS all you want, but M$ has a lot of spaghetti code in your computer....
Sure it is something. But it is not used well in desktop applications (applications can all write to your home directory with your session startup scripts and so, wreck your data or whatever else they please). One could run them as dummy users that can't write to your home directory, but that'd make for an extremely confusing and inconvenient application. One could with some care and a whole lot of dummy users and setuid scripts copying things about in intelligent ways create the same kind of security model that Microsoft are doing for IE7. Problem is that it isn't a very good design and more importantly; no one appears to be doing it.
Even if possible it does not help if no one does it, and even if it gets done it will not be as nice as Microsofts framework that utilizes the much better security model provided by NT. Now, as I said, if it works out for Microsoft there will no doubt be some movement to get something going on Linux as well, but credit where credit is due. Microsoft is doing something interesting here.
Has someone restated Godwin's law with DRM instead of nazis? If not I would like to call it "Jiushao's law" please.
Sure. I do prefer Firefox myself for similar reasons. The security sell has been the "big thing" for the casual user though.
This might of course to some part be because I consider the W3C to push through way too many way too complex standards at a way too high rate. How did we arrive at SVG really? A 750 page specification to manage to make vector drawings?
To some part I thought sanity would increase as Javascript became a deeply integrated web-standard, making a vector image format as simply javascript instance with some nice drawing primitives (basicly adopting the postscript model) would have been so much simpler that it isn't even funny. I guess it would have missed the big XML paradigm, but who is actually going to transform an SVG image with XSLT or whatever while serving pages?
But but, getting off-topic; you are in principle right, but it is not an end-user consideration.
Remember the age of the code though, how long has IE been around as compared to firefox. I would expect that about 6 years of sniffing thru firefox will result in less exploits that the amount thats still found in IE
Which to me read as "Firefox may have many exploits now, but in six years it'll be way better than IE". I would consider Firefox the better browser, I just argued about that guys post.
Interestingly I really don't know if I'd pick IE or Firefox first security-wise. A year ago it would have been a no-brainer; Firefox; however Microsofts security push really has stepped things up a fair bit. We get to know most problems because the update shows up, SP2 really straightened a lot of things out. They also seem to have some nice plans for IE7. Overall Microsoft security has improved greatly.
Still: Firefox has at least as good security and has more compelling features.
Except then Firefox will not get developed to as high a level as IE has and will never reach that point. Note that this observer has the same problem as most observers who say, "It's better!" And that problem is that the numbers aren't exactly fairly proportioned. An IE hack that gives someone access to all your 'net data then wipes your entire hard drive is counted as one bug, as is a firefox flaw that gives someone access to your last ten sites viewed. That's a biased and unfounded example, but the reality stands regardless - THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO DO A SECURITY STUDY.
Right, I don't really buy this study either. I were just stating that if one says that Firefox is worse now one can't argue that people should switch. Also, sure, if people switch over in masses the development effort will go faster, but this was not really about what was best for Firefox, but what is best for the user now.
There's piles of things wrong with IE, they're just not user-visible all the time and that is a main portion of the problem's gestalt.
This is one that shows up over and over, that IE's basic design is flawed. Which is, as far as I can tell, unfounded. All the external interfaces and architecture seems clean and nice enough, and since I (and I would guess; you) have no way to look at the source I can't say that we have any reason to believe that the IE source is in a bad state.
You can lock Firefox down if you want. Won't be able to see EVERYTHING, but it will definitely be secure. Not quite anywhere near as true with IE.
This does not say anything meaningful, it is true that if one keeps removing things sooner or later one will have removed all bugs. The point is to have a working browser with as good security as possible.
You can do this in linux. Natively. Just make yourself a different user with no rights to do certain things. Try that in Windows and see if it works for you. As to the, "Microsoft will solve everything in the end" mentality, well, I can't really argue with that.
This one I am actually a bit tired of, but I'll go over what has impressed me with what Microsoft is doing for Vista and IE7:
This is not a process-level permission thing (which would wreck the way the application works, you need to be able to save files, change settings and so on for it to be a sane desktop application). Rather Microsoft is finally getting around leveraging and extending the rather advanced and fine-grained NT security model for something. The basic idea is that most of the application runs with very restricted permissions and can launch subcomponents like a download or settings panel that have a higher level of permission. This is set on a very fine-grained level. There is no need to have separate components, nor is it all-or-nothing, a component can have access to specific system calls according with specific parameters, they may change only some given parts of the registry and so on.
Now this is not new as such. It is however leveraging well-known and well-implemented security technology to make a desktop application simultaneously relativly locked down but still as usable as it would be running at full permissions in all parts. It is not limited to IE7 either but there is supposed to be new tools and libraries to make it easy to take advantage of for new applications. As I said, Linux will have this real quick if it works out nicely. There are better security models for Linux already implemented and running in specialized distributions, they would no doubt be brought into mainline is they appear useful.
You're looking at it the wrong way. Microsoft is behind and has been so for a very long time. The stuff you want is part of the problem with their occasional 'buy instead of implement' business model.
This I call bullshit, we don't know the actual state of the IE code but I can't say that I see any reason why it should be bad. What Microsoft did do
I don't really believe in this, but arguing like that is arguing against Firefox.
My personal opinion on these things is: People care way too much about browser religion. Let people use IE, not that much wrong with it. Both IE and Firefox are huge complex applications processing huge amounts of diverse untrusted data. Sure it'd be great if they were secure, but it is just not happening that way yet.
There might be some hope on the horizon with low-rights IE7. It might be that it really does manage to remove the impact of the bugs, which is really the best case scenario as things stand. If so we will no doubt see similar approaches integrated in Linux desktops and see Firefox refactored to use the same approach.
Right, I messed up. The situation was different a little bit back and I hadn't noticed that things had changed. Sorry.
I still don't think the laptop is the whole story, it is quite likely that Intel has something good lined up for the desktop next generation. After a very long battle with the Netburst Intel engineers are finally set free on a somewhat less extreme archictecture. I would expect some pretty damn good stuff out of Intel for the next generation.
AMD's 3 line: K8, K8, K8
True that the Sempron64 has taken a great dive in price as of late. I based my statement of way too old information I guess (when the "original" Sempron was still the basic solution). I take back my statement about Intel on the budget end.
Sure, AMD holds the top-end. Not by an all that huge margin (say 20% on average to be generous) compared to how CPU wars have played out in the past. While AMD has gone from being the absolutely clear bang-for-the-buck manufacturer with the K7 to being the top-end holder with the K8 however Intel has really improved the rest of their product lines. A much overlooked chip today is the (new) Celeron D. 64-bit capable, solid performance, rock-bottom price. I would personally say that Intel offers better budget solutions at the moment.
Other than that however, I have said it before and I'll say it again; Intels desktop Pentium M roadmap can no doubt look great. The Pentium 4 did not work out as they wanted, but Intel has a lot of great engineers (just look how well the Pentium 4 has carried on competing despite the setbacks the design has seen), when they with the next big iteration are freed from the old P4 there will no doubt be a lot of interesting stuff coming from Intel.
Another interesting point is that Intel really is the only CPU maker that actually does more than one product-line at once. AMD kept the K7 around for a budget-line and stripped down the K8 a bit for laptops, but Intel has not just two, but actually three current designs ongoing (the P4, the Itanium and the Pentium M). An Intel roadmap may also contain a lot of goodies directly deriving from the fact that they have the design manpower to actually work on more than one path at once.
It is an open well-understood standard with a lot of support in the community and a variety of implementations (with varying degrees of completeness granted) are avilable. The OSS rubber-stamp might not be the most important thing here.
Revisionist history at its best.
To me at least the things we know about the Revolution is that the hardware will be roughly similar to the xbox 360 in the common metrics (give or take 50% it is the same basic CPU, memory and graphics technology). However there is still the possibility that Nintendo has something up its sleeve that might make this generation actually interesting.
I don't want to be one of the grumpy old people complaining about new things, but really, this generation seems to be a very incremental improvement. In some areas even a step back since no console will have a harddrive in their basic configuration. While one can surely upgrade to one of the new ones it is more or less like moving from a GeForce FX to a 7000-series on the PC; you'll get the same basic thing, just a bit more of it.
Don't compare this to the PSX -> PS2 step, sure it just added more power, but the difference is that the PSX were too weak for a lot of gameplay possibilities. There does not seem to be much new gameplay possibilities on the PS3 as of yet (though I'd love to be proven wrong), just a bit more polish and glitz.
With PostgreSQL behind the scenes one could take advantage of a myriad of really nice PostgreSQL features in a interprocess way. In fact, it could very well be used to replace a lot of old infrastructure in the desktop systems in a more robust and uniform way. Think triggers and listeners and so on for tons of nice IPC, use in-memory tables for volatile operations and get flawless performance. But pretty much foremost: Think excellent robustness and integrity.
I am very happy to see SQLite really bring a lot of nice database features to the people in a very easy to use way, I would however really like to see a global database process with a known "system schema" replace and enhance a lot of functionality already in desktop systems. Pretty much all functionality that changes any persistent state would be well served to go through a database at some point (even if it is a file that will be kept by the underlying filesystem there are things like recently-used lists, and maybe some triggers would be useful, and so on).
But but, time will tell. Will be interesting at any rate.
He is apparently more than a bit annoyed with having his name turn into an overused catchphrase.