If people were really liable for slander on web sites, Bill Gates could sue the pants off a great many slashdot posters who continually seek to defame Mr. Gates in much more inhumane manners than what is currently being done to CmdrTaco (limited by the 8 character Linux user names are we?) Even Slashdot's editorial staff has defamed Mr. Gates by the icon for Microsoft stories, which seeks to portray him as an alien out to convert everybody to his collective.
But because it is so incredibly fashionable and trendy to bash Microsoft, nobody gives it a second thought. If somebody dares claim that His Holiness Commander Taco is a racist, the whole world falls apart. People are screaming, lawsuits are flung in every direction, and people all over the world hold hands for the Poor, Meek Commander Taco who is just trying to make it is just trying to make it in the big, bad world.
If you were truly interested in stopping propaganda, you could constant be posting messages in defense of Bill Gates, since there is by far more slander posted against him than Commander Taco. But obviously you aren't: you are not interested in stopping slander, but only when it is convenient and goes against your pro-Open Source, liberal, anti-Microsoft agenda.
Please provide one iota of proof that this has ever happened.
Please point me to a subject, and to multiple URL's covering the subject, where the size and quality of the sites are equivalent, where the corporate sites have ranked higher in the search ranks.
Note that the algorithms that the search engines use are well documented, and that the sites whose content is tailored toward this rank higher. It is not a matter of paying the search engines, it is a matter of conforming to the search engine's mechanics.
I run an independent site for a musician, who also has a corporate site, and in some engines, my site is ranked on top, and other the corporate site is ranked on top. I didn't pay anybody for my site to be ranked on top, and I presume neither did my corporate competitor.
Until you provide me with documented proof that this is occuring, I will assume that you are a do-gooder liberal who wants the government to be bigger and bigger and pass more and more laws governing the acts of private entities.
I think Jackson's remedy will be at least that mild, possibly even more so. Jackson has hinted all along that he really wanted a settlement, and that suggests that he doesn't want to take responsibility for the repercussions which his ruling would generates. I believe that he will be _EXTREMELY_ conservative in his remedial ruling, because so much rests on his shoulders (e.g. the economy).
Another thing you have to keep in mind, is that if you are used to reading Slashdot, where many of the readers live in an alternate universe and believe that opening the source code or breaking up the company are serious possibilities, these will seem quite mild is comparison. But neither of those are viable anyways. The open source thing was never considered an option, and breaking up the company was ruled out as an option several months ago. The lawyers involved in the case tend to be a bit more level-headed and not as emotionally involved as the kooks you see in Slashdot and in the newgroups.
Intel has said (at least, internally) that the employees own it, and can do whatever they want with it, including selling it. Intel will have no right to search it, because it is not their property.
Intel is going to get the systems from an OEM - who will provide the system and support. It is up to the OEM to decide what OS is on it, what the options are, etc. They have stated that you will be able to pay something to get some of the components extra. For example, it will come standard with a CD-ROM drive, but you can pay a little bit of a money to get a DVD drive instead.
The computers Intel is giving to its employees are 667 MHz - and this will not happen until Q3 - so the machien will be quite low end for its time. I do not expect it to interefere with the company's production supplies.
You must be REALLY new to the computer industry. Willamette has been in design since late 1995, well over four years ago, and all new flagship processors take approximately that long to produce. It was not just thought up in response to AMD or whatever, as all of the clueless journalists will have you believe. Intel does a pretty good job of keeping things secret (no info on Willamette until last week, while AMD was hyping Athlon at least a year before first silicon).
It's perfectly possible to work on complex software projects without a debugger, it's just more difficult.
Debugging without a debugger is impossible for anything besides the smallest projects. One thing you are missing is the call stack. It is impossible to emulate this with any degree of usefulness with printf's. Second, you lose the ability to call functions at any point, which needs to be done to test the current state of your objects. Third, you lose tracepoints (which are 100% impossible to do without a debugger). Fourth, you lose threading ability and the ability to step between threads independently. Fifth, you cannot do variable substituion. Sixth, yuo cannot look at and/or step through assembly output. Seventh, printf's are useless after the fact (after the program crashes). Eighth,....
Even you for things which you CAN emulate (such as stepping through and examining variables), they are HORRIBLY ineffecient using printf's, since in order to do anything new, you need to re-compile and re-link, each time, where as in the debugger you just need to add your thing (which you can do without even restarting execution). Plus, printf's add all sorts of nasty and ugly code everywhere (yes, yes, #ifdef DEBUG, but that path of execution is often not updated and kept current).
Though printf's are useful in SOME circumstances (such as printing out complex trees of objects), I humbly suggest that if you are seriously using printf's, that you haven't mastered your debugger yet, and have a lot more to learn about it.
Taking a look at Intel's own posted benchmarks of the 800mhz Coppermine running on a 133mhz bus gives:
SPECINT - 38.4 SPECfp - 28.9
The fastest one is one in a Dell system, which has the numbers I originally quoted (SPECint: 38.9, SPECfp: 32.4). Proof is here for SPECint and here for SPECfp .
Now, I'd compare these to AMD's benchmarks, but AMD hasn't published SPECINT results, and only publishes the base SPECfp results. (Which, by the way, show the Athlon soundly thrashing the Coppermine
You are a liar. AMD Athlon 750 MHz, SPECint: 33.0, SPECfp: 26.5. (800 MHz Coppermine: 38.9 and 32.4). Proof: SPECint and SPECfp . AMD hasn't published results for the 800 or the 850, because those processors have such poor performance.
In any event, comparing SPEC scores is a rather _bad_ way to judge system performance. If you know enough to extrapolate new benchmark scores from current ones, you should also know that there are much better real world tests available.
SPEC is not the be-all and end-all of benchmarks but it is *the* standard benchmark for scientific commputing, and by far the most respected CPU benchmark in the world. I would *really* love to see TPC-C results for Athlon, but they haven't been published yet (gee, I wonder why?)
If you like, you can watch a 700mhz Athlon kick the snot out of a 733mhz PIII Coppermine running on a 133mhz bus over at Ace's Hardware
And I should trust some ma and pa benchmarks over the most professional and industry standard benchmarks for what reason? For starters, spec is a dot-org and Ace's is a dot-com, so SPEC is inherently less biased. I don't trust benchmarks from dot-com sites.
So next time, please take your results somwhere else or provide a real source for them.
Well, it is next time, and the source is all above.
Your statement, "Intel has never had a processor of [sic] equal processor speed that outperformed Intel", is patently false. AMD's Athlon outperforms a Coppermine of equal clock speed by greater than 17%, in both integer and floating-point operations. Why do people still believe that Intel remains unchallenged?
Coppermine is faster than Athlon on industry standard benchmarks. Athlon is only faster on old benchmarks comparing Athlon to Katmai. On recently taken benchmarks, Coppermine wins hands down.
To wit, SPECcpu95:
Coppermine 800 MHz: SPECint - 38.9, SPECfp - 32.4
Athlon 750 MHz (the fastest for which SPEC is available): SPECint - 33.0, SPECfp - 26.5.
Athlon 850 MHz (scaled from the above, which is generous because the 850 according to some reports is very slow due to cache speed): SPECint - 37.4, SPECfp - 30
I would also LOVE to see the TPC-C benchmarks for Athlon, but they aren't even published yet. The Athlon's utterly pathetic L2 cache performance, as well as its lack of support of MP, makes Intel by leaps and bounds the winner in this area. If Athlon ever supports MP, Foster will already be out, which will seriously clean up in that area.
The only benchmarks which Athlon actually does better than Pentium III, is back when comparing Katmai. Coppermine is much different than Katmai, and performs better than Athlon at almost every benchmark. AMD won't tell you this, of course, and is maintaing benchmarks of Athlon vs. Katmai, not Athlon vs. Coppermine.
It is remarkable that Intel with its five year old architecture still beats the pants of AMD's massively hyped, brand new microarchitecture. And, Intel has a brand new microarchitecture (which has a 400 MHz FSB, a trace cache, a 3 GHz ALU, and a few other as-of-yet unannounced MAJOR features) coming out in about six months, which will most likely completely put AMD out of business (especially if Intel can catch up with its manufacturing problems, which is the real issue here).
Most people don't know how a computer works. I'm talking basic computing concepts here, not transistor/gate level.
RAM. Registers. I/O. This is not rocket science, but I doubt if 6 million people could satisfy my criterion for knowing how a computer works.
What does this have to do with Linux use? I know some users of Linux who do not even know how to program in assembly language, and I certainly know many who have never done VLSI circuit design. Most Linux users do not understand how computers work at all, but you do not need to since it is an easy-to-use operating system.
Not exactly done right, though it's nice that the shell they use for command.com now allows you to use your up arrow instead of that stupid F3 key.
This comment just goes to show how incredibly clueless most Linux users are about Windows NT. Most have never used Windows NT, but believe that their experience with Windows 98 suffices as Windows NT experience ("it looks the same so it must be the same code"). FYI, Windows NT has had the up-arrow since the beginning. It is certainly not new with Windows 2000. Several other non-Unix systems have had the up-arrow for quite a long time as well. I do not believe it is even a Unix invention.
Timna is optimized for low cost, but Transmeta is optimized for low power, not low cost. For example, the morphing software alone requires 16 MB to operate, so that adds a cost of 16 MB extra.
Samsung recently announced a "disposable PC", sub-$200, sounds fairly similar to this, and was based on Timna.
It absolutely baffles me that most people here think that AMD success == Intel leaving the microprocessor business. Talk about blowing things out or proportion!
The only reason AMD was so successful last quarter is because the demand for Intel chips FAR exceeded Intel's ability to manufacture them. This hardly says anything bad about Intel! It says their customers can't get enough of the parts which Intel made. AMD was used, at least by the major OEM's, as a substitute for Intel chips it couldn't get. Basically, AMD got lucky, because they were able to make what may potentially turn out to be long term relationships with the top OEM's as a result. If Intel didn't have manufacturing problems, AMD would have done much worse.
The Athlon succeeded, not because it was faster, but because it was available.
Now, here comes the meat of my point. Intel was not able to satisfy demand the huge demand. Q499 was Intel's record quarter in volume (and sales, and profit...) The reason for this is because the demand for PC's was HUGE that quarter. This is GOOD for chip makers, both AMD and Intel.
A record volume quarter which was hindered by manufacturing problems suggests to me that all Intel needs to do is get their manufacturing back on track, and they will be even better and do another record quarter! Intel's problem is not an inherent problem such as lack of demand, but it is too much demand! Manufacturing problems are temporary, and Intel's are associated with ramping up the.18 process (which was the fastest ramp-up in its history). Intel is going to so seriously kick ass when that process is fully mature (and AMD, also, will likely have problems ramping their.18 up).
Right now Intel has 84% marketshare, and AMD has 14%. Tom's suggestion that Intel is going to go to 0% marketshare and AMD is going to go to 97% marketshare is ludicrous because:
AMD DOES NOT HAVE THE MANUFACTURING CAPACITY TO SUPPLY THE ENTIRE PC INDUSTRY WITH CHIPS.
Intel has 7 or 8 really big fabs, all of which ALREADY are 0.18. AMD has one, which is in the process or being ramped up. The suggestion that AMD with this one really big fab can out MANUFACTURE Intel with a bunch of really big fabs is just ludicrous.
Of course, Intel does not have the capacity to supply the industry, either. We saw that last year. However, Intel does have much more capital and no debt, and is putting two new fabs up this year. Intel can recover from manufcaturing problems because they have money.
Folks, this is NOT an issue of who has the better chip. There is virtually not performance difference between Pentium III and Athlon (if anything, Pentium III has a significant advantage right now because it can do MP and is available with much bigger and faster caches). All the OEM's want is parts. This is an issue of manufacturing.
Worst case scenario (for Intel) is that they drop to about 50% marketshare. Is that bad for Intel? You bet. Their market cap would go on a free fall.
I do believe that AMD is undervalued and that Intel is ludicrously overvalued. Does that mean Intel will go bankrupt and AMD will be worth 1/3 trillion dollars next year? No, but probably they will come a bit closer in price (perhaps even the same order of magnitude)
You are really, really out of touch. Please stop spreading false information on the internet.
Xeon's are MUCH different from the regular Pentium III's. For starters, the main selling point is MP. Regular Pentium III's can only do DP, but the Xeon can do 4 way. Furthermore, the Xeon is available with 512k, 1M, or 2M of L2 cache. The regular Pentium III has only 256k L2. The Xeon's L2 runs at full clock speed, the regular Pentium II/III's run at half speed (except the Coppermine's, which run at full speed)
I will be honest. When it comes to the Intel - AMD battle, I prefer Crusoe. It was kept quiet till they had a chip in production.
What are you smoking, and where can I get some?
It was publically known for MONTHS before their announcement exactly what Transmeta was doing. I yawned throughout reading "the great revelation" when it finally arrived, because it was literally exactly what everyone was expecting and had written about for months. At least a year back, there was endless HYPE about the microprocessor innovations (which they failed to live up to of course). You have got to be KIDDING if you think Crusoe was kept quiet until the announcement. Either than or you were literally living on Mars from 1998-1999.
Anyways, what does the Intel-AMD war have to do with Crusoe? The battle is over basic and performance desktop chips, not over mobile chips (mobile Athlon, anyone?) Why would you prefer a player in a totally separate market? Have you just jumped on the trendy Linux train and learned to ignore any actual technical facts whatsoever?
You feel a personal connection with technology, less its mechanics than its applications and consequences.
?????? I am a professional engineer. I design computers for a living. Yes, you better believe I care deeply about the mechanics of technology. If Katz had ever written a single line of code in his life, or understood some single basic concept of how the simplest technology works, he might have the slightest clue. So geeks are only the people sit on the newsgroups and argue about DeCSS and online privacy?? For Christ's sake, Tom Brokaw cares more about the application of technology than the mechanics. So does my grandma. Congratulations Katz, you just created a generalization which EXCLUDES anybody with any clue whatsoever about technology, and includes the rest. The people who built the damn computers you are using are not technically savvy? God damn, you are a moron, Katz.
They talk openly about sex and politics, debate the future of technology, dump on revered leaders, challenge the existence of God, and are viscerally libertarian. They defy government, business, or any other institution to shut down their freewheeling culture.
Right. Every geek is a libertarian, and every geek is an atheist. Was this guy born yesterday?? Even on Slashdot (does that count as a "hip open source hang out", Katz??) there are plenty of liberal and Christian posters. Sheesh. PLEASE stop using the word "geek" Katz - you are simply describing a clique of people who cannot think for themselves and just copy their values from each other. You don't deserve the word "geek".
You're a fan of The Simpsons and The Matrix. You saw Phantom Menace opening weekend despite the hype and despite Jar Jar. You are obsessive about pop culture, which is what you talk about with your friends or coworkers every Monday.
"Despite the hype"? The hype was CREATED by Star Wars fans!!! Remember the people who bought the ticket only to see the 30 second trailer? But these people are now BESIDES the hype?? Knock, knock - any thing at all in that head of yours??
But, anyways, I don't own a TV and am certainly not interested in cheesy sci-fi, and I don't give a rat's ass about pop culture. But I do have VAX cluster in my home (but I guess that just makes corporate, since VMS is not open source.... aieeee!) and use it to calculate palindromes. Oh, I guess I'm not a geek now (the horror!!!!) because I hate Linux and because I haven't caught a single episode of Voyageor.
The only people more clueless than Katz are those who actually wrote to him asking if they were a geek, as if Katz's approval somehow affords some sort of self-confidence. Those people long for acceptance even more than the highest ranks in the high school cliques. Sheesh.
The whole essence of geekdom is that there is supposed to be no agenda and people are supposed to think for themselves. The only difference between geeks is that some are fat and some are skinny??? Katz is such a moronic, clueless jackass, that he says someone who watches some certain teevee show and watches some movie and subscribes to some political agenda is a geek. Geez, could you miss the point a little more?? No longer is being a geek about striking out your own identity, but its about subscribing to Katz's GEEK-HOWTO and buying into a few mass-consumed, mass-produced, mass-cultural media products. Give me a fucking break. (The fact that Katz's stereotypes are so true says more that the self-proclaimed "geek" community is more a bunch of copy-cats than free-thinking rebels, but that's a story for another day...)
You are truly an absolute disgrace to true free thinking individuals. You think being a geek is to just be like everybody else in this stupid global clique. Please do us a favor and stop calling your community "geeks". You are not a geek, and your followers are not geeks, you are a wannabe and your followers are commoditized automatons.
Obviously they were planning the Willamette processor for quite some time, but I still think that Intel rushed the processor to market because of the Athlon. They are going beyond their traditional Moore's Law pace (maybe it should be renamed "The Old Intel Monopoly Law" instead) which they rarely did before.
Contrary to what's reported in the media, most people on Willamette (and, to some extent, in the rest of Intel) consider Athlon to be a pretty good thing - it keeps us on our toes and challenges us to do better. It would be a pretty boring life, especially as an engineer, to simply crank out a product year after year, if there really wasn't any challenge to perform. Yes, management has pushed on Willamette hard, and has gotten the frequency to some pretty high levels but this is a natural response - any company who doesn't constantly respond to competitors new products will not succeed. So yeah, Willamette is being pushed farther ahead than usual because of Athlon, but why exactly do you consider this to be strange or unexpected behavior??
We all know how bad MS is at vaporware... now Intel is playing the same game. 800 mHz coppermines were announced over a month ago, and yet you can't buy them. Just as Intel is trying to prevent Athlon purchases, they will try to prevent Crusoe purchases throught vaporware. Isn't it interesting that vaporware applies to HW as much as it does to SW?
Intel actually uses vaporware hardly at all. The 800 MHz Coppermine IS available - I know of many systems which are shipping with them. With the exception of Merced, Intel generally does not pre-announce projects. A prime example is Willamette, which has just barely been spoken about, and which absolutely NO technical details have been announced for. The reason is simple: If Intel announced that Willamette was going to come out on such-and-such a date, and that people should not but Athlon because of it, guess what? People would not but Pentium III either. Pre-announcing in the microprocessor industry is suicide, and Intel does it VERY little (besides Merced). Intel certainly does it less than the other processor companies, and has a history of bringing out a product which nobody knew was planned (remember how surprised people were at how fast the P6 was?) Most of the info in the press you see about Willamette etc. is not officially from Intel sources.
Yes, Willamette has been in design since 1995. The media is clueless about the microprocessor industry, and when Willamette is released, the headlines will be "Intel Releases Willamette in Response to Athlon", even though it was been brewing for 5 years. It was not like Intel just decided to whip out Willamette because Athlon came out (though, yes, Athlon has pressured the schedule, somewhat, at the end).
By the way: anyone see the news about Timna?
Timna is going to rock hard, and I expect it to bring Intel stock to even higher levels. Samsung has announced a "disposable PC" based on Timna which will be sub-$200 and will be in a sealed case - not updgradable/repairable. When it breaks down or gets too old, the user will just replace it. (Sorry - I don't have the URL describing this offhand). Obviously the margin is low for the CPU/chipset in a sub-$200 PC, but can you even come close to imagining the volume?? This will be a "Crusome Killer" much more than any other product, because of its sheer cost.
If you remember vinyl records, they used to cost between $5-7 (cheaper on sale or for top 10 acts). When CD's came on the scene in the early 80's, they were $14-17 per CD because the record industry said "only 3 factories can produce them, so they cost more. Just wait, these are so cheap to produce that when we ramp up, the cost will be the same as vinyl."
But, ah - today CD's at discount stores cost $12.99, which is substantially less than $14 in 1985 dollars (perhaps 50% as much?). There is an article on the Hyperion website which shows that the price of recorded music has decreased dramatically since the beginning on the 20th century. In the early part of the century, one single record cost a good portion of a man's weekly wage, but now the $12.99 is absolute peanuts.
The fact is that online music distribution will have the complete opposite effect.. With CD's and cassettes, the costs of production and distribution are too high for any individual artist to afford, and hence only a select few of them can enjoy widespread exposure.
The cost of producing music today is GOOD because it pre-selects talented artists. There are tens of thousands of talented artists who produce music today. If anybody has the opportunity to produce music, then people will make MP3's of people singing in the shower. There will be a greater quantity of music, but it will be impossible to sift through it all, because the number of talented artists will not increase substantially.
I completely fail to see how you draw your conclusions. Please explain to me how there is any factual basis in your preposterous claim that online distribution will be more expensive.
On-line distribution is not more expensive. On-line distribution will have SUBSTANTIALLY lower margins. This will result only in low risk, mega-pop-superstars who are guaranteed to turn over profit (Backstreet Boys, Pearl Jam, etc.) More creative and risky acts won't receive play because the margins will be so low.
All it requires is recording a track, encoding it into a digital format, and placing it on a web server.
It costs between $250,000 and $1,000,000 to produce CD's today. The cost of the physical artifact is negligible compared to the cost of recording. On-line distribution will not reduce the actual cost of music substantially. However, the selling price will go down because most people are so clueless that they think they will be getting less because they don't get a physical artifact.
Most people who think CD's are expensive don't have the slightest clue about what it costs to produce. Some people seem to think you just go next to the computer, do cat/dev/audio > my-album.au, and you're done. Maybe this will work for certain primitive musics, but I'd love to see you produce something substantial, such as Mahler's symphony #8, for less than $1,000,000. Anybody who advocates less expensive music is advocating a serious degradation in music production quality. As a music lover, I am firmly against this. You are really willing to give up the absolute stellar quality of music production for free distribution? No thanks, I'm more than happy to pay for quality.
We have so much more available to us now than we did in the beginning of the century... back then it was to make sure that one person didn't print 1000 copies of another author's book and make money off of it unfairly.
We have more precisely BECAUSE we have copyright. Do you enjoy movies? TV shows? Music? All of these media require literally millions of dollars to produce. Movies takes many, many millions of dollars to produce. People are able to make money off these because of copyright. Titanic cost $200 million to produce. If it weren't for copyright, it wouldn't have made any money, because it could be freely pirated in theaters. You are completely out of your mind if somebody is going to invest $200 million in something which they are going to give away.
Copyright law is not a relic, but is more relevant today than ever before. An amazing number of people do not understand the difference between owning a physical artifact, and owning the right to what's on there. In the future, there will be fewer physical artifacts. So the ownership of the content independent of the physical representation is AHEAD of its time, not behind.
What if I wanted to listen to a Gentle Giant track from 1974. Or a Dixie Dregs track from 1981?
Buy all the Gentle Giant CD's while you can get them. Online distribution of music will completely homogenize music, because it is so expensive to deliver music. The margins will be so low (if not zero), that only highly profitable, homogenized music such as Backstreet Boys and Nine Inch Nails will get produced. The more creative and innovative acts (such as the would-be Gentle Giants of the 2000's) will not get produced. The music industry will splinter into two camps: mega-produced mega-stars on one hand, and poorly produced amateur acts on the other. The middle ground of artists who have thrived in the industry, such as Gentle Giant, other progressive musics, folk musics, jazz, and ethnic musics, will be completely destroyed. This is the danger of online distribution. Say goodbye to creativity, and usher in the new era of commoditized downloads, with ads attached.
I'm particularly not looking forward to the the future of recorded classical music, which online distribution will completely and thoroughly destroy. (Wanna stream The Ring on 56k, anyone?)
Um... sledgehammer will run all x86 stuff natively. Instant software base.
Yeah, but so will Merced (and so will future Intel IA-32 processors). The only competitive advantage of Sledgehammer is that it will have the new "64 bit extensions" - but if no software uses that, that's no an advantage - just bloat.
Now you could argue that Sledgehammer will be faster for IA-32 than Merced will be. However, it will certainly not be as fast for 64 bit as future IA-64 proliferations will be because there are so many limitations to that architecture (number of registers, for example). I also doubt that it will be as fast as Intel's fastest IA-32 implementation at the time, since the 64 bit support will necessarily slow the processor down. It will also be bigger and hotter than a vanilla IA-32 implementation.
If Sledgehammer is AMD's only post-K7 microarchitecture in the works (and I do not know if it is), they do not have a bright outlook. I do not see how Sledgehammer could succeed either at the 64 bit market, or the 32 bit market, just on technical terms, let alone on marketing terms. I actually thought it was something of a joke when I first heard about it, and am surprised that it actually appears to be a product.
Slashdot Mirror
If people were really liable for slander on web sites, Bill Gates could sue the pants off a great many slashdot posters who continually seek to defame Mr. Gates in much more inhumane manners than what is currently being done to CmdrTaco (limited by the 8 character Linux user names are we?) Even Slashdot's editorial staff has defamed Mr. Gates by the icon for Microsoft stories, which seeks to portray him as an alien out to convert everybody to his collective.
But because it is so incredibly fashionable and trendy to bash Microsoft, nobody gives it a second thought. If somebody dares claim that His Holiness Commander Taco is a racist, the whole world falls apart. People are screaming, lawsuits are flung in every direction, and people all over the world hold hands for the Poor, Meek Commander Taco who is just trying to make it is just trying to make it in the big, bad world.
If you were truly interested in stopping propaganda, you could constant be posting messages in defense of Bill Gates, since there is by far more slander posted against him than Commander Taco. But obviously you aren't: you are not interested in stopping slander, but only when it is convenient and goes against your pro-Open Source, liberal, anti-Microsoft agenda.
Please provide one iota of proof that this has ever happened.
Please point me to a subject, and to multiple URL's covering the subject, where the size and quality of the sites are equivalent, where the corporate sites have ranked higher in the search ranks.
Note that the algorithms that the search engines use are well documented, and that the sites whose content is tailored toward this rank higher. It is not a matter of paying the search engines, it is a matter of conforming to the search engine's mechanics.
I run an independent site for a musician, who also has a corporate site, and in some engines, my site is ranked on top, and other the corporate site is ranked on top. I didn't pay anybody for my site to be ranked on top, and I presume neither did my corporate competitor.
Until you provide me with documented proof that this is occuring, I will assume that you are a do-gooder liberal who wants the government to be bigger and bigger and pass more and more laws governing the acts of private entities.
I think Jackson's remedy will be at least that mild, possibly even more so. Jackson has hinted all along that he really wanted a settlement, and that suggests that he doesn't want to take responsibility for the repercussions which his ruling would generates. I believe that he will be _EXTREMELY_ conservative in his remedial ruling, because so much rests on his shoulders (e.g. the economy).
Another thing you have to keep in mind, is that if you are used to reading Slashdot, where many of the readers live in an alternate universe and believe that opening the source code or breaking up the company are serious possibilities, these will seem quite mild is comparison. But neither of those are viable anyways. The open source thing was never considered an option, and breaking up the company was ruled out as an option several months ago. The lawyers involved in the case tend to be a bit more level-headed and not as emotionally involved as the kooks you see in Slashdot and in the newgroups.
Intel has said (at least, internally) that the employees own it, and can do whatever they want with it, including selling it. Intel will have no right to search it, because it is not their property.
Intel is going to get the systems from an OEM - who will provide the system and support. It is up to the OEM to decide what OS is on it, what the options are, etc. They have stated that you will be able to pay something to get some of the components extra. For example, it will come standard with a CD-ROM drive, but you can pay a little bit of a money to get a DVD drive instead.
The computers Intel is giving to its employees are 667 MHz - and this will not happen until Q3 - so the machien will be quite low end for its time. I do not expect it to interefere with the company's production supplies.
You must be REALLY new to the computer industry. Willamette has been in design since late 1995, well over four years ago, and all new flagship processors take approximately that long to produce. It was not just thought up in response to AMD or whatever, as all of the clueless journalists will have you believe. Intel does a pretty good job of keeping things secret (no info on Willamette until last week, while AMD was hyping Athlon at least a year before first silicon).
It's perfectly possible to work on complex software projects without a debugger, it's just more difficult.
Debugging without a debugger is impossible for anything besides the smallest projects. One thing you are missing is the call stack. It is impossible to emulate this with any degree of usefulness with printf's. Second, you lose the ability to call functions at any point, which needs to be done to test the current state of your objects. Third, you lose tracepoints (which are 100% impossible to do without a debugger). Fourth, you lose threading ability and the ability to step between threads independently. Fifth, you cannot do variable substituion. Sixth, yuo cannot look at and/or step through assembly output. Seventh, printf's are useless after the fact (after the program crashes). Eighth, ....
Even you for things which you CAN emulate (such as stepping through and examining variables), they are HORRIBLY ineffecient using printf's, since in order to do anything new, you need to re-compile and re-link, each time, where as in the debugger you just need to add your thing (which you can do without even restarting execution). Plus, printf's add all sorts of nasty and ugly code everywhere (yes, yes, #ifdef DEBUG, but that path of execution is often not updated and kept current).
Though printf's are useful in SOME circumstances (such as printing out complex trees of objects), I humbly suggest that if you are seriously using printf's, that you haven't mastered your debugger yet, and have a lot more to learn about it.
Taking a look at Intel's own posted benchmarks of the 800mhz Coppermine running on a 133mhz bus gives:
SPECINT - 38.4 SPECfp - 28.9
The fastest one is one in a Dell system, which has the numbers I originally quoted (SPECint: 38.9, SPECfp: 32.4). Proof is here for SPECint and here for SPECfp .
Now, I'd compare these to AMD's benchmarks, but AMD hasn't published SPECINT results, and only publishes the base SPECfp results. (Which, by the way, show the Athlon soundly thrashing the Coppermine
You are a liar. AMD Athlon 750 MHz, SPECint: 33.0, SPECfp: 26.5. (800 MHz Coppermine: 38.9 and 32.4). Proof: SPECint and SPECfp . AMD hasn't published results for the 800 or the 850, because those processors have such poor performance.
In any event, comparing SPEC scores is a rather _bad_ way to judge system performance. If you know enough to extrapolate new benchmark scores from current ones, you should also know that there are much better real world tests available.
SPEC is not the be-all and end-all of benchmarks but it is *the* standard benchmark for scientific commputing, and by far the most respected CPU benchmark in the world. I would *really* love to see TPC-C results for Athlon, but they haven't been published yet (gee, I wonder why?)
If you like, you can watch a 700mhz Athlon kick the snot out of a 733mhz PIII Coppermine running on a 133mhz bus over at Ace's Hardware
And I should trust some ma and pa benchmarks over the most professional and industry standard benchmarks for what reason? For starters, spec is a dot-org and Ace's is a dot-com, so SPEC is inherently less biased. I don't trust benchmarks from dot-com sites.
So next time, please take your results somwhere else or provide a real source for them.
Well, it is next time, and the source is all above.
Your statement, "Intel has never had a processor of [sic] equal processor speed that outperformed Intel", is patently false. AMD's Athlon outperforms a Coppermine of equal clock speed by greater than 17%, in both integer and floating-point operations. Why do people still believe that Intel remains unchallenged?
Coppermine is faster than Athlon on industry standard benchmarks. Athlon is only faster on old benchmarks comparing Athlon to Katmai. On recently taken benchmarks, Coppermine wins hands down.
To wit, SPECcpu95:
Coppermine 800 MHz: SPECint - 38.9, SPECfp - 32.4
Athlon 750 MHz (the fastest for which SPEC is available): SPECint - 33.0, SPECfp - 26.5.
Athlon 850 MHz (scaled from the above, which is generous because the 850 according to some reports is very slow due to cache speed): SPECint - 37.4, SPECfp - 30
I would also LOVE to see the TPC-C benchmarks for Athlon, but they aren't even published yet. The Athlon's utterly pathetic L2 cache performance, as well as its lack of support of MP, makes Intel by leaps and bounds the winner in this area. If Athlon ever supports MP, Foster will already be out, which will seriously clean up in that area.
The only benchmarks which Athlon actually does better than Pentium III, is back when comparing Katmai. Coppermine is much different than Katmai, and performs better than Athlon at almost every benchmark. AMD won't tell you this, of course, and is maintaing benchmarks of Athlon vs. Katmai, not Athlon vs. Coppermine.
It is remarkable that Intel with its five year old architecture still beats the pants of AMD's massively hyped, brand new microarchitecture. And, Intel has a brand new microarchitecture (which has a 400 MHz FSB, a trace cache, a 3 GHz ALU, and a few other as-of-yet unannounced MAJOR features) coming out in about six months, which will most likely completely put AMD out of business (especially if Intel can catch up with its manufacturing problems, which is the real issue here).
Most people don't know how a computer works. I'm talking basic computing concepts here, not transistor/gate level.
RAM. Registers. I/O. This is not rocket science, but I doubt if 6 million people could satisfy my criterion for knowing how a computer works.
What does this have to do with Linux use? I know some users of Linux who do not even know how to program in assembly language, and I certainly know many who have never done VLSI circuit design. Most Linux users do not understand how computers work at all, but you do not need to since it is an easy-to-use operating system.
Not exactly done right, though it's nice that the shell they use for command.com now allows you to use your up arrow instead of that stupid F3 key.
This comment just goes to show how incredibly clueless most Linux users are about Windows NT. Most have never used Windows NT, but believe that their experience with Windows 98 suffices as Windows NT experience ("it looks the same so it must be the same code"). FYI, Windows NT has had the up-arrow since the beginning. It is certainly not new with Windows 2000. Several other non-Unix systems have had the up-arrow for quite a long time as well. I do not believe it is even a Unix invention.
Timna would be a MUCH better choice.
Timna is optimized for low cost, but Transmeta is optimized for low power, not low cost. For example, the morphing software alone requires 16 MB to operate, so that adds a cost of 16 MB extra.
Samsung recently announced a "disposable PC", sub-$200, sounds fairly similar to this, and was based on Timna.
It absolutely baffles me that most people here think that AMD success == Intel leaving the microprocessor business. Talk about blowing things out or proportion!
.18 process (which was the fastest ramp-up in its history). Intel is going to so seriously kick ass when that process is fully mature (and AMD, also, will likely have problems ramping their .18 up).
The only reason AMD was so successful last quarter is because the demand for Intel chips FAR exceeded Intel's ability to manufacture them. This hardly says anything bad about Intel! It says their customers can't get enough of the parts which Intel made. AMD was used, at least by the major OEM's, as a substitute for Intel chips it couldn't get. Basically, AMD got lucky, because they were able to make what may potentially turn out to be long term relationships with the top OEM's as a result. If Intel didn't have manufacturing problems, AMD would have done much worse.
The Athlon succeeded, not because it was faster, but because it was available.
Now, here comes the meat of my point. Intel was not able to satisfy demand the huge demand. Q499 was Intel's record quarter in volume (and sales, and profit...) The reason for this is because the demand for PC's was HUGE that quarter. This is GOOD for chip makers, both AMD and Intel.
A record volume quarter which was hindered by manufacturing problems suggests to me that all Intel needs to do is get their manufacturing back on track, and they will be even better and do another record quarter! Intel's problem is not an inherent problem such as lack of demand, but it is too much demand! Manufacturing problems are temporary, and Intel's are associated with ramping up the
Right now Intel has 84% marketshare, and AMD has 14%. Tom's suggestion that Intel is going to go to 0% marketshare and AMD is going to go to 97% marketshare is ludicrous because:
AMD DOES NOT HAVE THE MANUFACTURING CAPACITY TO SUPPLY THE ENTIRE PC INDUSTRY WITH CHIPS.
Intel has 7 or 8 really big fabs, all of which ALREADY are 0.18. AMD has one, which is in the process or being ramped up. The suggestion that AMD with this one really big fab can out MANUFACTURE Intel with a bunch of really big fabs is just ludicrous.
Of course, Intel does not have the capacity to supply the industry, either. We saw that last year. However, Intel does have much more capital and no debt, and is putting two new fabs up this year. Intel can recover from manufcaturing problems because they have money.
Folks, this is NOT an issue of who has the better chip. There is virtually not performance difference between Pentium III and Athlon (if anything, Pentium III has a significant advantage right now because it can do MP and is available with much bigger and faster caches). All the OEM's want is parts. This is an issue of manufacturing.
Worst case scenario (for Intel) is that they drop to about 50% marketshare. Is that bad for Intel? You bet. Their market cap would go on a free fall.
I do believe that AMD is undervalued and that Intel is ludicrously overvalued. Does that mean Intel will go bankrupt and AMD will be worth 1/3 trillion dollars next year? No, but probably they will come a bit closer in price (perhaps even the same order of magnitude)
Intel's stock probably will come down eventually. It is ludicrously overpriced, but not close to RHAT, LNUX, YHOO, ...
You are really, really out of touch. Please stop spreading false information on the internet.
Xeon's are MUCH different from the regular Pentium III's. For starters, the main selling point is MP. Regular Pentium III's can only do DP, but the Xeon can do 4 way. Furthermore, the Xeon is available with 512k, 1M, or 2M of L2 cache. The regular Pentium III has only 256k L2. The Xeon's L2 runs at full clock speed, the regular Pentium II/III's run at half speed (except the Coppermine's, which run at full speed)
I will be honest. When it comes to the Intel - AMD battle, I prefer Crusoe. It was kept quiet till they had a chip in production.
What are you smoking, and where can I get some?
It was publically known for MONTHS before their announcement exactly what Transmeta was doing. I yawned throughout reading "the great revelation" when it finally arrived, because it was literally exactly what everyone was expecting and had written about for months. At least a year back, there was endless HYPE about the microprocessor innovations (which they failed to live up to of course). You have got to be KIDDING if you think Crusoe was kept quiet until the announcement. Either than or you were literally living on Mars from 1998-1999.
Anyways, what does the Intel-AMD war have to do with Crusoe? The battle is over basic and performance desktop chips, not over mobile chips (mobile Athlon, anyone?) Why would you prefer a player in a totally separate market? Have you just jumped on the trendy Linux train and learned to ignore any actual technical facts whatsoever?
You feel a personal connection with technology, less its mechanics than its applications and consequences.
?????? I am a professional engineer. I design computers for a living. Yes, you better believe I care deeply about the mechanics of technology. If Katz had ever written a single line of code in his life, or understood some single basic concept of how the simplest technology works, he might have the slightest clue. So geeks are only the people sit on the newsgroups and argue about DeCSS and online privacy?? For Christ's sake, Tom Brokaw cares more about the application of technology than the mechanics. So does my grandma. Congratulations Katz, you just created a generalization which EXCLUDES anybody with any clue whatsoever about technology, and includes the rest. The people who built the damn computers you are using are not technically savvy? God damn, you are a moron, Katz.
They talk openly about sex and politics, debate the future of technology, dump on revered leaders, challenge the existence of God, and are viscerally libertarian. They defy government, business, or any other institution to shut down their freewheeling culture.
Right. Every geek is a libertarian, and every geek is an atheist. Was this guy born yesterday?? Even on Slashdot (does that count as a "hip open source hang out", Katz??) there are plenty of liberal and Christian posters. Sheesh. PLEASE stop using the word "geek" Katz - you are simply describing a clique of people who cannot think for themselves and just copy their values from each other. You don't deserve the word "geek".
You're a fan of The Simpsons and The Matrix. You saw Phantom Menace opening weekend despite the hype and despite Jar Jar. You are obsessive about pop culture, which is what you talk about with your friends or coworkers every Monday.
"Despite the hype"? The hype was CREATED by Star Wars fans!!! Remember the people who bought the ticket only to see the 30 second trailer? But these people are now BESIDES the hype?? Knock, knock - any thing at all in that head of yours??
But, anyways, I don't own a TV and am certainly not interested in cheesy sci-fi, and I don't give a rat's ass about pop culture. But I do have VAX cluster in my home (but I guess that just makes corporate, since VMS is not open source.... aieeee!) and use it to calculate palindromes. Oh, I guess I'm not a geek now (the horror!!!!) because I hate Linux and because I haven't caught a single episode of Voyageor.
The only people more clueless than Katz are those who actually wrote to him asking if they were a geek, as if Katz's approval somehow affords some sort of self-confidence. Those people long for acceptance even more than the highest ranks in the high school cliques. Sheesh.
The whole essence of geekdom is that there is supposed to be no agenda and people are supposed to think for themselves. The only difference between geeks is that some are fat and some are skinny??? Katz is such a moronic, clueless jackass, that he says someone who watches some certain teevee show and watches some movie and subscribes to some political agenda is a geek. Geez, could you miss the point a little more?? No longer is being a geek about striking out your own identity, but its about subscribing to Katz's GEEK-HOWTO and buying into a few mass-consumed, mass-produced, mass-cultural media products. Give me a fucking break. (The fact that Katz's stereotypes are so true says more that the self-proclaimed "geek" community is more a bunch of copy-cats than free-thinking rebels, but that's a story for another day...)
You are truly an absolute disgrace to true free thinking individuals. You think being a geek is to just be like everybody else in this stupid global clique. Please do us a favor and stop calling your community "geeks". You are not a geek, and your followers are not geeks, you are a wannabe and your followers are commoditized automatons.
Obviously they were planning the Willamette processor for quite some time, but I still think that Intel rushed the processor to market because of the Athlon. They are going beyond their traditional Moore's Law pace (maybe it should be renamed "The Old Intel Monopoly Law" instead) which they rarely did before.
Contrary to what's reported in the media, most people on Willamette (and, to some extent, in the rest of Intel) consider Athlon to be a pretty good thing - it keeps us on our toes and challenges us to do better. It would be a pretty boring life, especially as an engineer, to simply crank out a product year after year, if there really wasn't any challenge to perform. Yes, management has pushed on Willamette hard, and has gotten the frequency to some pretty high levels but this is a natural response - any company who doesn't constantly respond to competitors new products will not succeed. So yeah, Willamette is being pushed farther ahead than usual because of Athlon, but why exactly do you consider this to be strange or unexpected behavior??
We all know how bad MS is at vaporware... now Intel is playing the same game. 800 mHz coppermines were announced over a month ago, and yet you can't buy them. Just as Intel is trying to prevent Athlon purchases, they will try to prevent Crusoe purchases throught vaporware. Isn't it interesting that vaporware applies to HW as much as it does to SW?
Intel actually uses vaporware hardly at all. The 800 MHz Coppermine IS available - I know of many systems which are shipping with them. With the exception of Merced, Intel generally does not pre-announce projects. A prime example is Willamette, which has just barely been spoken about, and which absolutely NO technical details have been announced for. The reason is simple: If Intel announced that Willamette was going to come out on such-and-such a date, and that people should not but Athlon because of it, guess what? People would not but Pentium III either. Pre-announcing in the microprocessor industry is suicide, and Intel does it VERY little (besides Merced). Intel certainly does it less than the other processor companies, and has a history of bringing out a product which nobody knew was planned (remember how surprised people were at how fast the P6 was?) Most of the info in the press you see about Willamette etc. is not officially from Intel sources.
Yes, Willamette has been in design since 1995. The media is clueless about the microprocessor industry, and when Willamette is released, the headlines will be "Intel Releases Willamette in Response to Athlon", even though it was been brewing for 5 years. It was not like Intel just decided to whip out Willamette because Athlon came out (though, yes, Athlon has pressured the schedule, somewhat, at the end).
By the way: anyone see the news about Timna?
Timna is going to rock hard, and I expect it to bring Intel stock to even higher levels. Samsung has announced a "disposable PC" based on Timna which will be sub-$200 and will be in a sealed case - not updgradable/repairable. When it breaks down or gets too old, the user will just replace it. (Sorry - I don't have the URL describing this offhand). Obviously the margin is low for the CPU/chipset in a sub-$200 PC, but can you even come close to imagining the volume?? This will be a "Crusome Killer" much more than any other product, because of its sheer cost.
If you remember vinyl records, they used to cost between $5-7 (cheaper on sale or for top 10 acts). When CD's came on the scene in the early 80's, they were $14-17 per CD because the record industry said "only 3 factories can produce them, so they cost more. Just wait, these are so cheap to produce that when we ramp up, the cost will be the same as vinyl."
But, ah - today CD's at discount stores cost $12.99, which is substantially less than $14 in 1985 dollars (perhaps 50% as much?). There is an article on the Hyperion website which shows that the price of recorded music has decreased dramatically since the beginning on the 20th century. In the early part of the century, one single record cost a good portion of a man's weekly wage, but now the $12.99 is absolute peanuts.
The fact is that online music distribution will have the complete opposite effect.. With CD's and cassettes, the costs of production and distribution are too high for any individual artist to afford, and hence only a select few of them can enjoy widespread exposure.
The cost of producing music today is GOOD because it pre-selects talented artists. There are tens of thousands of talented artists who produce music today. If anybody has the opportunity to produce music, then people will make MP3's of people singing in the shower. There will be a greater quantity of music, but it will be impossible to sift through it all, because the number of talented artists will not increase substantially.
I completely fail to see how you draw your conclusions. Please explain to me how there is any factual basis in your preposterous claim that online distribution will be more expensive.
On-line distribution is not more expensive. On-line distribution will have SUBSTANTIALLY lower margins. This will result only in low risk, mega-pop-superstars who are guaranteed to turn over profit (Backstreet Boys, Pearl Jam, etc.) More creative and risky acts won't receive play because the margins will be so low.
All it requires is recording a track, encoding it into a digital format, and placing it on a web server.
It costs between $250,000 and $1,000,000 to produce CD's today. The cost of the physical artifact is negligible compared to the cost of recording. On-line distribution will not reduce the actual cost of music substantially. However, the selling price will go down because most people are so clueless that they think they will be getting less because they don't get a physical artifact.
Most people who think CD's are expensive don't have the slightest clue about what it costs to produce. Some people seem to think you just go next to the computer, do cat /dev/audio > my-album.au, and you're done. Maybe this will work for certain primitive musics, but I'd love to see you produce something substantial, such as Mahler's symphony #8, for less than $1,000,000. Anybody who advocates less expensive music is advocating a serious degradation in music production quality. As a music lover, I am firmly against this. You are really willing to give up the absolute stellar quality of music production for free distribution? No thanks, I'm more than happy to pay for quality.
We have so much more available to us now than we did in the beginning of the century... back then it was to make sure that one person didn't print 1000 copies of another author's book and make money off of it unfairly.
We have more precisely BECAUSE we have copyright. Do you enjoy movies? TV shows? Music? All of these media require literally millions of dollars to produce. Movies takes many, many millions of dollars to produce. People are able to make money off these because of copyright. Titanic cost $200 million to produce. If it weren't for copyright, it wouldn't have made any money, because it could be freely pirated in theaters. You are completely out of your mind if somebody is going to invest $200 million in something which they are going to give away.
Copyright law is not a relic, but is more relevant today than ever before. An amazing number of people do not understand the difference between owning a physical artifact, and owning the right to what's on there. In the future, there will be fewer physical artifacts. So the ownership of the content independent of the physical representation is AHEAD of its time, not behind.
What if I wanted to listen to a Gentle Giant track from 1974. Or a Dixie Dregs track from 1981?
Buy all the Gentle Giant CD's while you can get them. Online distribution of music will completely homogenize music, because it is so expensive to deliver music. The margins will be so low (if not zero), that only highly profitable, homogenized music such as Backstreet Boys and Nine Inch Nails will get produced. The more creative and innovative acts (such as the would-be Gentle Giants of the 2000's) will not get produced. The music industry will splinter into two camps: mega-produced mega-stars on one hand, and poorly produced amateur acts on the other. The middle ground of artists who have thrived in the industry, such as Gentle Giant, other progressive musics, folk musics, jazz, and ethnic musics, will be completely destroyed. This is the danger of online distribution. Say goodbye to creativity, and usher in the new era of commoditized downloads, with ads attached.
I'm particularly not looking forward to the the future of recorded classical music, which online distribution will completely and thoroughly destroy. (Wanna stream The Ring on 56k, anyone?)
Um... sledgehammer will run all x86 stuff natively. Instant software base.
Yeah, but so will Merced (and so will future Intel IA-32 processors). The only competitive advantage of Sledgehammer is that it will have the new "64 bit extensions" - but if no software uses that, that's no an advantage - just bloat.
Now you could argue that Sledgehammer will be faster for IA-32 than Merced will be. However, it will certainly not be as fast for 64 bit as future IA-64 proliferations will be because there are so many limitations to that architecture (number of registers, for example). I also doubt that it will be as fast as Intel's fastest IA-32 implementation at the time, since the 64 bit support will necessarily slow the processor down. It will also be bigger and hotter than a vanilla IA-32 implementation.
If Sledgehammer is AMD's only post-K7 microarchitecture in the works (and I do not know if it is), they do not have a bright outlook. I do not see how Sledgehammer could succeed either at the 64 bit market, or the 32 bit market, just on technical terms, let alone on marketing terms. I actually thought it was something of a joke when I first heard about it, and am surprised that it actually appears to be a product.