I don't quite understand why, as it is obvious that Intel should be cutting their chip prices now. With AMD ramping up its production of chips costing only about 50-75% as compared to Intel processors, Intel is going to lose.
Obviously you haven't paid attention to the market in the last six months and/or you are clueless about economics. THE DEMAND FOR INTEL PRODUCTS AT THEIR CURRENT PRICES FAR EXCEEDS SUPPLY OF THE PRODUCTS. This is a fact; the supply problems Intel is facing are well-documented. If anything, Intel could RAISE prices and still sell as many chips, and be even more profitable.
You also have to understand that the low-end is _nothing_ compared to the business segment of the industry. AMD currently has about 13% of the total CPU market, and Intel has 84%. However, in the home PC segment it is about 50%/50%. This shows how tiny a segment the home PC market is, and shows that at least 84% of Intel's business is in the business segment. The bread and butter of Intel's processor business is servers. AMD has no product in that segment yet, and, even if they did, they would have a hard time marketing it, and finding an OEM for it. Currently, Athlon has penetrated the home PC market, but nowhere else significantly.
The reason CPU makers want to play in the home PC business is not for profits, but for name recognition. It keeps the brand name visible to consumers, not just businesses.
If anything, AMD will become less profitable from marketing the Duron, because the ASP of its parts will dramatically drop. No longer are wafer starts going to profitable Athlons, but a $50 part. By producing Duron's, they are losing a ton of opportunity cost for producing Athlon's.
find -mtime 1 -name '*.html' -exec grep -i text \;
Nope this isn't correct.
It is case-senstive for *.html
The syntax is incorrect for find - you need '{}' to specify the file, and need to specific the starting directory
You need to specify/dev/null as a parameter to grep, or it won't print out the filename it found the text in (this is the only portable way to do it)
jackass? It's unreasonable to assume that there will be capital letters in html UNLESS YOUR FILESYSTEM LIKES TO YELL AT YOU.
There could very well be capital letters in *.html, for example, if you transferred the files from Windows to the Unix machine. The point is, Unix cares, and is too broken to realize that *.HTML is the same as *.html, without extra coddling and hand-holding from the user, whereas VMS knows this from the get-go.
The FreeVMS project is largely dead. I do not believe that it will be able to produce a free version of VMS.
However, there is the VMS Hobyyist Program, which permits free use of VMS (including most layered products including clustering, DECwindows, C compiler, development tools, DECnet, TCP/IP, etc., etc.) on an Alpha or VAX system. Also, VMS source code is available for a small charge (around $100) from Compaq. It is not open source, but the quality is demonstrably superior than most open source software, except perhaps for the GUI stuff.
For starters, if you haven't used VMS since 1986, you are not qualified to comment on it. If I hadn't used Unix since Version 7 would you value my opinion?
The main selling point of VMS is clustering. VMS is generally regarded as the leader in clustering technology, and no Unix clustering implementation comes close to VMS's clustering technology even 10 years ago. No Unix clustering technology today implement shared disk clusters, distributed lock managers, or load balance sets.
The newest VMS technology, Galaxy, is one of the most revolutionary advancements in OS technology in the last 10 years - the only Unix with it is Tru64 - who stole it from VMS.
In general, VMS is considered significantly more secure and reliable than Unix. Whereas most Unix systems usually crash every few months, VMS systems have been known to be up for over a decade.
The user interface of VMS is much easier to use, and much more powerful than Unix. It is an English-like syntax. If you think it is arcane, I have to ask, what were you using? The VMS command to search a directory tree of HTML files modified since yesterday for a string is:
It appears to me that the VMS command is much easier to look at and understand.
VMS also supports many features that Unix never will such as file versioning, asynchronous I/O, rational memory management and IPC, calling standard, etc., etc., etc., etc.
Many Slashdotters think that Unix = Good, everything else = bad, but a Unix monopoly would be as bad as a Microsoft monopoly. Many computers users are not even AWARE that there are more than three operating systems available (Unix, Mac, and Windows). Diversity is good! Microsoft's downfall does not mean we should should have yet another monopoly. That's why I welcome alternative systems such as VMS and OS/2 and all of the others.
VMS and OS/2 are extremely good systems. VMS is by far my favorite operating system in the world, and we can only hope that the industry trend is to have MORE different types of systems. This is very good from a security standpoint, because a bug in one system would not be able to take down the whole world. But from a personal point of view, I think most techies would be very bored in a world where there is only one system (I know I would!). The whole excitement of computers is learning new systems, logging on to a new OS for the first time, learning a new language, a new API, etc. If all of the world is an Intel PC running Linux (as it increasingly is becoming), there's isn't a fun any more.
Demand diversity. Run VMS. Run OS/2. Run OS/390. Buy a Tandem. Get an old HP mainframe. Demand support for these systems from ISP's, ISV's, web sites, and the like. A one-platform universe if it is Linux or Windows or TRS-DOS is a very, very boring and dangerous thing.
It's sad how many people don't realize that prety much ALL of "modern" computing was invented at Xerox at least 20 years ago!
Even sadder is the ignorant people who believe all that stuff was invented at Xerox!
Please see this link: MouseSite. The mouse, windows, and some of the basic concepts of the GUI, were invented by Engelbart at Stanford in 1968. Xerox had absolutely nothing to do with this.
Furthermore, Xerox had absolutely nothing to do with the invention of networking! They did invent _ethernet_ in the mid-1970's, but networking did exist way earlier. My DEC timeline states that in 1965 there was a network between a PDP-6 between Boston and Australia over a telex link. This was way, way before ethernet.
Of the remaining item on your list, bit mapped displays, I don't know about that, but I'll let you have that one.
If searching for your name in Altavista brought up garbage, then you didn't perform the search properly. Altavista supports phrases so you can search for "first_name last_name", and it will bring up all pages with that phrase. Try doing THAT with google. Alternatively you can search for "first_name near last_name" (without quotes) and it will bring up instances where they are close. Again, try that on google.
Google is good for people new to the inernet, and for people who want to be trendy and fashionable, but for seasoned internet users doing serious searching, Altavista is by far the best on a technical basis, because it lets you do what it wants and doesn't have stupid AI in the background. Google is only good for doing the simplest most general searches, but for anything serious it is worthless. Of course, this is to be expected since DEC built Altavista.
Whoever moderated the above down needs to have their moderation privileges revoked. It does not contain ANYTHING inflammatory, unless you are offended by somebody who actually offers an opinion which is counter to you (the horror!). To the person who moderated this: please re-read Slashdot's moderation guidelines.
The "slashdot community" (whatever that is) typically never takes a "blame the tool" approach. Things like Napster which facilitate music piracy never receive the blame for piracy - the user does. This example is applicable to many of the issues which are discussed on slashdot.
The only exception to this rule is a Microsoft tool.
If Microsoft writes a tool which users fuck themselves over with, Microsoft - and not the clueless users - get the blame. Why is Microsoft an exception to "guns don't kill people, people kill people".
IMHO, anybody who supports Napster on the basis that it is only a tool, yet blames Microsoft on this worm (or any other worm which was not coded within Microsoft), needs to have clues beaten into them severely, and spoon-fed to them for life.
Intel did not lose "billions" on the Pentium bug, they lost $475,000,000 in actual money related to the costs of replacing the chip. This is at most 1/4 of "billions".
The cost to the public of the Pentium bug was not "probably nothing" but at least as much as Intel's cost: OEM's had to replace all of the faulty chips for free also, and this cost a pretty penny (for the OEM's and/or customers). Not to mention downtime for the customers, as well as the cost of having fault calculations.
Please get your facts straight before you post. You have no right posting about something which you have absolutely no clue about, to a public forum.
You say everybody outside of the technology industry does not understand what digital media will do for them, but I find that most of the people inside the technology industry needed to be beaten with a serious cluestick concering the issue also. Regularly on forums like this there are comments such as "information wants to be free" mostly from teenagers who have absolutely no conception about what goes on in order to produce the media, how much work it takes, how many people contribute, and how much it costs. You have Jon Katz spouting off about how anything which can be encoded digitally should be free, while he reaps the profits from the book he published two months ago, which is not published digitally. Most technology people have _very_ little understanding of the consiequences of the technologies. It is our job to figure out how to make machines which can calculate and move data, but to suggest that you understand how these should be used and what the laws should be is just absolutely assinine. I'll trust content producers choose for themselves how they distribute their work, and if they choose digital, or paper, or acetate, it's fine with me. The last thing we need is a bunch of teeny-boppers on slashdot whining how about how much smarter they are than all of the Big Evil Corporations (tm).
My main concern as a music fan is that with on-line music, the margins will reduce to almost nothing, and therefore only non-risky artists will be produced, and that music will be packaged in five minute downloadable snippets instead of grandiose packages of art such as any Metallica album. I believe that this will severely hurt the music industry. How do you respond to this? Would you be able to operate in such a changed model? Would this new paradigm be beneficial to musicians and fans, or would it be even harder to get exposure? I deeply applaud you as the first musicians to take a stand againt piracy, and completely support your case.
The great irony of Katz's proclomation of the death of intellectual property is that he survives on it. For example, he has a book with a cover price of $22.95 (which is way more than the cost to print, only has a few good chapters, 'n like that . . . ), and which is NOT available on-line.
Let's teach Katz a lesson. We need to steal HIS book and put it on-line. Let's just buy it, spend the time typing it up, and make copies EVERYWHERE. He will no longer be able to earn any income on the book. Maybe he will learn what is wrong with stealing. Perhaps he will quit saying "information wants to be free" and other such cliches. The most interesting this is how long it will take for him to sue us. And I _guarantee_ you he will which makes him completely unprincipled. I, of course, agree that he _should_ sue, but that's the point - he thinks this is all just free information, and hopefully he will change his tune after seeing how it affects him.
I'm serious about this. Want to help type it up and make mirrors? Mail me at vaxman@palindrome.org.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The drivers themselves do it. Think about it. You need a driver to be able to query the card to find it's address.
These may be true for some newer PC ethernet hardware, but most older hardware, as well as most of the higher-end computers, do indeed have the MAC addresses "burned" in. Just look for the EPROM chip on the card, and note the lack of a flash chip. I believe all but one of my ethernet cards has a burned in MAC address. Sure you can replace the EPROM, but that is very time-consuming.
iMac's come built in with ethernet. Most PC's except for the very low end come with ethernet. Most home users have networks when they have more than one PC, so these have ethernet cards also. I have about a dozen computers at home, and all but two or three have ethernet.
The serial number was accessed through the CPUID instruction by sending it a particular parameter (eax=3). That instruction will exist still (as it has since the 486), but will be undefined for eax=3. So the instruction count will not be reduced. Intel HAS retired instructions before, some of the old, old 16 bit stuff.
The difference is 84% marketshare vs. 10%
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AMD is short because it is just sold out. Intel is sold out because it can't produce what it has promised.
These two things are the EXACT same thing. Also keep in mind that Intel has 84% of the CPU market share and AMD has 10%. Supplying 84% of the industry with CPU's is quite a bit more difficult than supplying 10% of the industry. The shortages will be more noticeable and more people will complain.
Think about it. Intel releases a 1GHz PIII a few days after the release of the 1GHz Athlon Yet, AMD releases the 900 and 950 MHz at the same time, because the 1GHz is no abnormal stretch for them. Intel on the other hand, only releases the 1GHz PIII, with a gap from 800MHz to 1000MHz..
Ahh, yes, the fashionable "They went from 800 MHz to 1000 MHz, therefore the must be lying about the 1000 MHz parts" cliche. You will note that the difference between these is 20%. In the old days, bins were never this tight. The next generation after the 4.77 MHz 8088 was the 8 MHz model, nearly a 50% increase. The 486 went from 25-33-50-66-100, all at least 33% increases. All of these increases absolutely dwarf the 800-1000 MHz increase. So why do you keep harping on it? Too little technical knowledge to poke holes in the Intel plan?
CSCO and MSFT are NOT of the top of the food chain. INTC is ahead of both, and second only to GE.
Even RDHT and LNUX (the business "champions" of most of this site's patrons) are not doing so hot.
LNUX has tumbled MUCH more than almost any other stock. MUCH, MUCH more than Microsoft has or practically any other stock in the market (only a couple of the dot-com's have tumbled more). It's not a matter of "Even LNUX" but "Especially LNUX". LNUX made several financial headlines because it fell so much. It is one the most embarrassing stock performances ever, and I really sorry for all the people who lost so much money over and were blinded by the Linux hype.
Linux stocks falling independently of market
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It is easy to write off the tumbling Linux stocks as just part of the market free-fall, but Linux stocks have fallen completely independently of the rest of the market. LNUX has been falling almost every day since its peak, and has been sub-$100 since before the Microsoft decision. It has all fallen much MORE than the other stocks. MSFT is well over half of its 52-week high, but LNUX is well under 10% of its 52-week high. The drop in Linux stocks has less to do with the market free-fall, than the public's realization that all of the Linux stuff was absolutely nothing besides hype, with no possibility to succeed technically or financially.
While it is true that Open Source is not a panacea, the Ken Thompson C compiler backdoor does not apply. That particular exploit was only possible because people did not have the source to the binary needed to bootstrap a new machine into running Unix. They had to use a binary provided by Ken Thompson, who they had to trust.
My, my. Are you really, really new to programming or something? The whole point of KT's hypothetical hack was that it would be invisible from the programmer. If you created a special version of GCC which would include the backdoor, and would detect if it was recompiling itself _without_ the backdoor, it would include the backdoor. Obviously the backdoor would not show up in the sources to GCC, because the source which had it would be deleted, but was compiled by a version which detected its absence, and would re-insert it in that case. If such a backdoor was implemented, it would be almost impossible to remove. It has absolutely nothing to do with open source vs. proprietary - in fact, open source is much more vulnerable to this problem, because the users have a false sense of security from looking at the source code, and believe that it what is actually executing on the machine without further verification.
And that is the real matter at hand -- trust. If you are not reviewing every line of code and then compiling every binary yourself -- and let's face it, most people don't have the resources to do that -- you better make damn sure you trust the provider of your pre-compiled binaries.
Incorrect. As KT demonstrated, you cannot trust the compiler. You can review the source, but it won't tell you anything at all about the code which the compiler actuallly generates.
Examining the assembler output will get you farther, but there still could easily be a backdoor in the assembler. You can look at the binary file itself, but can you trust the OS to load exactly that (and not "fix up" the binary somehow)? You can verify with a logic analyzer that the correct code is being fetched. But it would be a little more difficult to verify that the CPU is actually performing the correct operations, and not doing its own backdoor.
Standard open source benchmarks are a fine idea (and I wouldn't call this article a "proposal", but merely a "demand), but the problem with this article is not the fact that it is about open source, but the fact that it was written by Van Smith, who is - yes - the Jon Katz of Tom's Hardware. Remember, this is the guy who proclaimed a couple of months ago that Intel would be soon exiting the microprocessor business. Right.
The more clued-in Slashdotters have Jon Katz filters installed on the page, but we also need to figure out a way to get a filter on any link to a Van Smith article - he truly is a moron, and in one of the least competent "cyber-journallists" in work today.
In addition to the above, MS's biggest innovation (along with Intel) is making the computer industry horizontally integrated. This is, by leaps and bounds, the single biggest computer-related innovation of the last 20 years.
Before MS and Intel marketed their products to OEM's who were able to establish a standard PC platform, the industry was vertically integrated. You either went to DEC, bought a VAX with a DEC-made processor, a DEC-made OS, DEC-made applications, DEC-made terminals, and even DEC-made printers. Or you went to IBM, or any of the other vertical players, and you got the same thing. MS changed that.
MS's innovation was to establish a standard platform, so you could use interchangeable parts. All vendors ahere to the same standard, and have a tremendous amount of choice about what kind of system you want to buy, what OS you want it, how makes the processor, etc.
This is the main reason why computing is so cheap to buy. In 1981, an IBM PC cost $5,000 (in 1980 dollars, which is about $9,000 in 2000 dollars). Now a machine substantially more powerful costs $400. All vendors sell the same thing creating so much competition that the price was driven down that much. This is undeniably a great thing for the industry, and for all consumers. If it wasn't for MS, Compaq would be selling PC's with their own OS, Dell would be also, and Gateway would, and they would also have their own value-added features and they would be incompatible. This is how the Unix (outside of Linux) and mainframe industries still are (and for that type of thing, it's fine, but for the mass-market consumers, it is not fine, because it is more expensive).
There is nothing funnier than watch Linux people make fun of MSFT's stock price.
LNUX is 41.00 right now, off a 52-week high of 320.00 (almost 1/8 of its high!). It should be below its IPO price by next week, as it downward spiral continues.
RHAT is 28.63, off it 52-week high of 151 (less than 1/5 of its high)
CALD is 13.50 less than half of it 52-week high of 33 (and even below its IPO price of 14.00)
MSFT is 79.00, below its 52-week high of 119 - clearly it had dropped MUCH less than ANY of the Linux stocks in the past week.
HOWTO's are better than any software or hardware documentation I've ever seen.... especially Microsoft's!
I am sorry that you have never used VMS. I have the complete VMS documentation in a shelf in my home office. The shelf is over 6' tall, yet it is still not big enough to hold all of the VMS documentation. It's on CD, also. The hardware documentation is a whole other ballpark - of comparable size, if you have all of the manuals.
Of course, all of it is written by professional documentation writers, not amateur programmers (which is who write the HOWTO's). It is all in a clear, consistent form, and it is easy to find information. Most of the HOWTO's are poorly written, and some even include swear words, Microsoft hating, and various other highly non-professional items (see the Assembly-HOWTO for an example of a horrible HOWTO).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't quite understand why, as it is obvious that Intel should be cutting their chip prices now. With AMD ramping up its production of chips costing only about 50-75% as compared to Intel processors, Intel is going to lose.
Obviously you haven't paid attention to the market in the last six months and/or you are clueless about economics. THE DEMAND FOR INTEL PRODUCTS AT THEIR CURRENT PRICES FAR EXCEEDS SUPPLY OF THE PRODUCTS. This is a fact; the supply problems Intel is facing are well-documented. If anything, Intel could RAISE prices and still sell as many chips, and be even more profitable.
You also have to understand that the low-end is _nothing_ compared to the business segment of the industry. AMD currently has about 13% of the total CPU market, and Intel has 84%. However, in the home PC segment it is about 50%/50%. This shows how tiny a segment the home PC market is, and shows that at least 84% of Intel's business is in the business segment. The bread and butter of Intel's processor business is servers. AMD has no product in that segment yet, and, even if they did, they would have a hard time marketing it, and finding an OEM for it. Currently, Athlon has penetrated the home PC market, but nowhere else significantly.
The reason CPU makers want to play in the home PC business is not for profits, but for name recognition. It keeps the brand name visible to consumers, not just businesses.
If anything, AMD will become less profitable from marketing the Duron, because the ASP of its parts will dramatically drop. No longer are wafer starts going to profitable Athlons, but a $50 part. By producing Duron's, they are losing a ton of opportunity cost for producing Athlon's.
find -mtime 1 -name '*.html' -exec grep -i text \;
Nope this isn't correct.
It is case-senstive for *.html
The syntax is incorrect for find - you need '{}' to specify the file, and need to specific the starting directory
You need to specify /dev/null as a parameter to grep, or it won't print out the filename it found the text in (this is the only portable way to do it)
jackass? It's unreasonable to assume that there will be capital letters in html UNLESS YOUR FILESYSTEM LIKES TO YELL AT YOU.
There could very well be capital letters in *.html, for example, if you transferred the files from Windows to the Unix machine. The point is, Unix cares, and is too broken to realize that *.HTML is the same as *.html, without extra coddling and hand-holding from the user, whereas VMS knows this from the get-go.
The FreeVMS project is largely dead. I do not believe that it will be able to produce a free version of VMS.
However, there is the VMS Hobyyist Program, which permits free use of VMS (including most layered products including clustering, DECwindows, C compiler, development tools, DECnet, TCP/IP, etc., etc.) on an Alpha or VAX system. Also, VMS source code is available for a small charge (around $100) from Compaq. It is not open source, but the quality is demonstrably superior than most open source software, except perhaps for the GUI stuff.
For starters, if you haven't used VMS since 1986, you are not qualified to comment on it. If I hadn't used Unix since Version 7 would you value my opinion?
./ -mtime=1 -name '*.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]' -exec grep -i text /dev/null '{}' \;
The main selling point of VMS is clustering. VMS is generally regarded as the leader in clustering technology, and no Unix clustering implementation comes close to VMS's clustering technology even 10 years ago. No Unix clustering technology today implement shared disk clusters, distributed lock managers, or load balance sets.
The newest VMS technology, Galaxy, is one of the most revolutionary advancements in OS technology in the last 10 years - the only Unix with it is Tru64 - who stole it from VMS.
In general, VMS is considered significantly more secure and reliable than Unix. Whereas most Unix systems usually crash every few months, VMS systems have been known to be up for over a decade.
The user interface of VMS is much easier to use, and much more powerful than Unix. It is an English-like syntax. If you think it is arcane, I have to ask, what were you using? The VMS command to search a directory tree of HTML files modified since yesterday for a string is:
$ SEARCH/SINCE=YESTERDAY [DIRECTORY...]*.HTML "TEXT"
The Unix equivalent is:
$ find
It appears to me that the VMS command is much easier to look at and understand.
VMS also supports many features that Unix never will such as file versioning, asynchronous I/O, rational memory management and IPC, calling standard, etc., etc., etc., etc.
Many Slashdotters think that Unix = Good, everything else = bad, but a Unix monopoly would be as bad as a Microsoft monopoly. Many computers users are not even AWARE that there are more than three operating systems available (Unix, Mac, and Windows). Diversity is good! Microsoft's downfall does not mean we should should have yet another monopoly. That's why I welcome alternative systems such as VMS and OS/2 and all of the others.
VMS and OS/2 are extremely good systems. VMS is by far my favorite operating system in the world, and we can only hope that the industry trend is to have MORE different types of systems. This is very good from a security standpoint, because a bug in one system would not be able to take down the whole world. But from a personal point of view, I think most techies would be very bored in a world where there is only one system (I know I would!). The whole excitement of computers is learning new systems, logging on to a new OS for the first time, learning a new language, a new API, etc. If all of the world is an Intel PC running Linux (as it increasingly is becoming), there's isn't a fun any more.
Demand diversity. Run VMS. Run OS/2. Run OS/390. Buy a Tandem. Get an old HP mainframe. Demand support for these systems from ISP's, ISV's, web sites, and the like. A one-platform universe if it is Linux or Windows or TRS-DOS is a very, very boring and dangerous thing.
It's sad how many people don't realize that prety much ALL of "modern" computing was invented at Xerox at least 20 years ago!
Even sadder is the ignorant people who believe all that stuff was invented at Xerox!
Please see this link: MouseSite. The mouse, windows, and some of the basic concepts of the GUI, were invented by Engelbart at Stanford in 1968. Xerox had absolutely nothing to do with this.
Furthermore, Xerox had absolutely nothing to do with the invention of networking! They did invent _ethernet_ in the mid-1970's, but networking did exist way earlier. My DEC timeline states that in 1965 there was a network between a PDP-6 between Boston and Australia over a telex link. This was way, way before ethernet.
Of the remaining item on your list, bit mapped displays, I don't know about that, but I'll let you have that one.
If searching for your name in Altavista brought up garbage, then you didn't perform the search properly. Altavista supports phrases so you can search for "first_name last_name", and it will bring up all pages with that phrase. Try doing THAT with google. Alternatively you can search for "first_name near last_name" (without quotes) and it will bring up instances where they are close. Again, try that on google.
Google is good for people new to the inernet, and for people who want to be trendy and fashionable, but for seasoned internet users doing serious searching, Altavista is by far the best on a technical basis, because it lets you do what it wants and doesn't have stupid AI in the background. Google is only good for doing the simplest most general searches, but for anything serious it is worthless. Of course, this is to be expected since DEC built Altavista.
Whoever moderated the above down needs to have their moderation privileges revoked. It does not contain ANYTHING inflammatory, unless you are offended by somebody who actually offers an opinion which is counter to you (the horror!). To the person who moderated this: please re-read Slashdot's moderation guidelines.
The "slashdot community" (whatever that is) typically never takes a "blame the tool" approach. Things like Napster which facilitate music piracy never receive the blame for piracy - the user does. This example is applicable to many of the issues which are discussed on slashdot.
The only exception to this rule is a Microsoft tool.
If Microsoft writes a tool which users fuck themselves over with, Microsoft - and not the clueless users - get the blame. Why is Microsoft an exception to "guns don't kill people, people kill people".
IMHO, anybody who supports Napster on the basis that it is only a tool, yet blames Microsoft on this worm (or any other worm which was not coded within Microsoft), needs to have clues beaten into them severely, and spoon-fed to them for life.
You have your facts COMPLETELY wrong.
Intel did not lose "billions" on the Pentium bug, they lost $475,000,000 in actual money related to the costs of replacing the chip. This is at most 1/4 of "billions".
The cost to the public of the Pentium bug was not "probably nothing" but at least as much as Intel's cost: OEM's had to replace all of the faulty chips for free also, and this cost a pretty penny (for the OEM's and/or customers). Not to mention downtime for the customers, as well as the cost of having fault calculations.
Please get your facts straight before you post. You have no right posting about something which you have absolutely no clue about, to a public forum.
You say everybody outside of the technology industry does not understand what digital media will do for them, but I find that most of the people inside the technology industry needed to be beaten with a serious cluestick concering the issue also. Regularly on forums like this there are comments such as "information wants to be free" mostly from teenagers who have absolutely no conception about what goes on in order to produce the media, how much work it takes, how many people contribute, and how much it costs. You have Jon Katz spouting off about how anything which can be encoded digitally should be free, while he reaps the profits from the book he published two months ago, which is not published digitally. Most technology people have _very_ little understanding of the consiequences of the technologies. It is our job to figure out how to make machines which can calculate and move data, but to suggest that you understand how these should be used and what the laws should be is just absolutely assinine. I'll trust content producers choose for themselves how they distribute their work, and if they choose digital, or paper, or acetate, it's fine with me. The last thing we need is a bunch of teeny-boppers on slashdot whining how about how much smarter they are than all of the Big Evil Corporations (tm).
My main concern as a music fan is that with on-line music, the margins will reduce to almost nothing, and therefore only non-risky artists will be produced, and that music will be packaged in five minute downloadable snippets instead of grandiose packages of art such as any Metallica album. I believe that this will severely hurt the music industry. How do you respond to this? Would you be able to operate in such a changed model? Would this new paradigm be beneficial to musicians and fans, or would it be even harder to get exposure? I deeply applaud you as the first musicians to take a stand againt piracy, and completely support your case.
Or, to the napster users:
You are a fan of the band you are stealing from. Aren't you afraid of offending them?
The great irony of Katz's proclomation of the death of intellectual property is that he survives on it. For example, he has a book with a cover price of $22.95 (which is way more than the cost to print, only has a few good chapters, 'n like that . . . ), and which is NOT available on-line.
Let's teach Katz a lesson. We need to steal HIS book and put it on-line. Let's just buy it, spend the time typing it up, and make copies EVERYWHERE. He will no longer be able to earn any income on the book. Maybe he will learn what is wrong with stealing. Perhaps he will quit saying "information wants to be free" and other such cliches. The most interesting this is how long it will take for him to sue us. And I _guarantee_ you he will which makes him completely unprincipled. I, of course, agree that he _should_ sue, but that's the point - he thinks this is all just free information, and hopefully he will change his tune after seeing how it affects him.
I'm serious about this. Want to help type it up and make mirrors? Mail me at vaxman@palindrome.org.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The drivers themselves do it. Think about it. You need a driver to be able to query the card to find it's address.
These may be true for some newer PC ethernet hardware, but most older hardware, as well as most of the higher-end computers, do indeed have the MAC addresses "burned" in. Just look for the EPROM chip on the card, and note the lack of a flash chip. I believe all but one of my ethernet cards has a burned in MAC address. Sure you can replace the EPROM, but that is very time-consuming.
iMac's come built in with ethernet. Most PC's except for the very low end come with ethernet. Most home users have networks when they have more than one PC, so these have ethernet cards also. I have about a dozen computers at home, and all but two or three have ethernet.
The serial number was accessed through the CPUID instruction by sending it a particular parameter (eax=3). That instruction will exist still (as it has since the 486), but will be undefined for eax=3. So the instruction count will not be reduced. Intel HAS retired instructions before, some of the old, old 16 bit stuff.
AMD is short because it is just sold out. Intel is sold out because it can't produce what it has promised.
These two things are the EXACT same thing. Also keep in mind that Intel has 84% of the CPU market share and AMD has 10%. Supplying 84% of the industry with CPU's is quite a bit more difficult than supplying 10% of the industry. The shortages will be more noticeable and more people will complain.
Think about it. Intel releases a 1GHz PIII a few days after the release of the 1GHz Athlon Yet, AMD releases the 900 and 950 MHz at the same time, because the 1GHz is no abnormal stretch for them. Intel on the other hand, only releases the 1GHz PIII, with a gap from 800MHz to 1000MHz..
Ahh, yes, the fashionable "They went from 800 MHz to 1000 MHz, therefore the must be lying about the 1000 MHz parts" cliche. You will note that the difference between these is 20%. In the old days, bins were never this tight. The next generation after the 4.77 MHz 8088 was the 8 MHz model, nearly a 50% increase. The 486 went from 25-33-50-66-100, all at least 33% increases. All of these increases absolutely dwarf the 800-1000 MHz increase. So why do you keep harping on it? Too little technical knowledge to poke holes in the Intel plan?
Ignorance? You're the ignorant one.
CSCO and MSFT are NOT of the top of the food chain. INTC is ahead of both, and second only to GE.
Even RDHT and LNUX (the business "champions" of most of this site's patrons) are not doing so hot.
LNUX has tumbled MUCH more than almost any other stock. MUCH, MUCH more than Microsoft has or practically any other stock in the market (only a couple of the dot-com's have tumbled more). It's not a matter of "Even LNUX" but "Especially LNUX". LNUX made several financial headlines because it fell so much. It is one the most embarrassing stock performances ever, and I really sorry for all the people who lost so much money over and were blinded by the Linux hype.
It is easy to write off the tumbling Linux stocks as just part of the market free-fall, but Linux stocks have fallen completely independently of the rest of the market. LNUX has been falling almost every day since its peak, and has been sub-$100 since before the Microsoft decision. It has all fallen much MORE than the other stocks. MSFT is well over half of its 52-week high, but LNUX is well under 10% of its 52-week high. The drop in Linux stocks has less to do with the market free-fall, than the public's realization that all of the Linux stuff was absolutely nothing besides hype, with no possibility to succeed technically or financially.
While it is true that Open Source is not a panacea, the Ken Thompson C compiler backdoor does not apply. That particular exploit was only possible because people did not have the source to the binary needed to bootstrap a new machine into running Unix. They had to use a binary provided by Ken Thompson, who they had to trust.
My, my. Are you really, really new to programming or something? The whole point of KT's hypothetical hack was that it would be invisible from the programmer. If you created a special version of GCC which would include the backdoor, and would detect if it was recompiling itself _without_ the backdoor, it would include the backdoor. Obviously the backdoor would not show up in the sources to GCC, because the source which had it would be deleted, but was compiled by a version which detected its absence, and would re-insert it in that case. If such a backdoor was implemented, it would be almost impossible to remove. It has absolutely nothing to do with open source vs. proprietary - in fact, open source is much more vulnerable to this problem, because the users have a false sense of security from looking at the source code, and believe that it what is actually executing on the machine without further verification.
And that is the real matter at hand -- trust. If you are not reviewing every line of code and then compiling every binary yourself -- and let's face it, most people don't have the resources to do that -- you better make damn sure you trust the provider of your pre-compiled binaries.
Incorrect. As KT demonstrated, you cannot trust the compiler. You can review the source, but it won't tell you anything at all about the code which the compiler actuallly generates.
Examining the assembler output will get you farther, but there still could easily be a backdoor in the assembler. You can look at the binary file itself, but can you trust the OS to load exactly that (and not "fix up" the binary somehow)? You can verify with a logic analyzer that the correct code is being fetched. But it would be a little more difficult to verify that the CPU is actually performing the correct operations, and not doing its own backdoor.
Standard open source benchmarks are a fine idea (and I wouldn't call this article a "proposal", but merely a "demand), but the problem with this article is not the fact that it is about open source, but the fact that it was written by Van Smith, who is - yes - the Jon Katz of Tom's Hardware. Remember, this is the guy who proclaimed a couple of months ago that Intel would be soon exiting the microprocessor business. Right.
The more clued-in Slashdotters have Jon Katz filters installed on the page, but we also need to figure out a way to get a filter on any link to a Van Smith article - he truly is a moron, and in one of the least competent "cyber-journallists" in work today.
In addition to the above, MS's biggest innovation (along with Intel) is making the computer industry horizontally integrated. This is, by leaps and bounds, the single biggest computer-related innovation of the last 20 years.
Before MS and Intel marketed their products to OEM's who were able to establish a standard PC platform, the industry was vertically integrated. You either went to DEC, bought a VAX with a DEC-made processor, a DEC-made OS, DEC-made applications, DEC-made terminals, and even DEC-made printers. Or you went to IBM, or any of the other vertical players, and you got the same thing. MS changed that.
MS's innovation was to establish a standard platform, so you could use interchangeable parts. All vendors ahere to the same standard, and have a tremendous amount of choice about what kind of system you want to buy, what OS you want it, how makes the processor, etc.
This is the main reason why computing is so cheap to buy. In 1981, an IBM PC cost $5,000 (in 1980 dollars, which is about $9,000 in 2000 dollars). Now a machine substantially more powerful costs $400. All vendors sell the same thing creating so much competition that the price was driven down that much. This is undeniably a great thing for the industry, and for all consumers. If it wasn't for MS, Compaq would be selling PC's with their own OS, Dell would be also, and Gateway would, and they would also have their own value-added features and they would be incompatible. This is how the Unix (outside of Linux) and mainframe industries still are (and for that type of thing, it's fine, but for the mass-market consumers, it is not fine, because it is more expensive).
There is nothing funnier than watch Linux people make fun of MSFT's stock price.
LNUX is 41.00 right now, off a 52-week high of 320.00 (almost 1/8 of its high!). It should be below its IPO price by next week, as it downward spiral continues.
RHAT is 28.63, off it 52-week high of 151 (less than 1/5 of its high)
CALD is 13.50 less than half of it 52-week high of 33 (and even below its IPO price of 14.00)
MSFT is 79.00, below its 52-week high of 119 - clearly it had dropped MUCH less than ANY of the Linux stocks in the past week.
HOWTO's are better than any software or hardware documentation I've ever seen.... especially Microsoft's!
I am sorry that you have never used VMS. I have the complete VMS documentation in a shelf in my home office. The shelf is over 6' tall, yet it is still not big enough to hold all of the VMS documentation. It's on CD, also. The hardware documentation is a whole other ballpark - of comparable size, if you have all of the manuals.
Of course, all of it is written by professional documentation writers, not amateur programmers (which is who write the HOWTO's). It is all in a clear, consistent form, and it is easy to find information. Most of the HOWTO's are poorly written, and some even include swear words, Microsoft hating, and various other highly non-professional items (see the Assembly-HOWTO for an example of a horrible HOWTO).