AMD Area 64 winners love the INQUIRER

As a longtime reader of your works both here at the Inqwell and from places off in distant memory, I'm pleased to report that I'm one of the 64 contest winners of the area-64.com contest for an Athlon64 system as well as a chance to represent AMD and the Enthusiast community during the Athlon64 processor launch the 22nd of this month. Why a "chance" at representing? Read on, dear friend, read on.

Why all of this fancy footwork around Sunnyvale? It seems that to fully participate, you have various contests to participate in once AMD has you delivered via coach-class air into their neck of the woods. These tasks vary from tagging AMD-laden pedestrians while driving down the streets of Sunnyvale, to answering salvo after salvo of technical questions; like "Which AMD processors come with 1MB of L2 cache?", and "Which K5 chipset did AMD release?". As per the attached PDF files will show, once all 64 contestants arrive (chic, no?), we'll have to prove our worth before going into the final rounds. It's all based on a point system, so the last two standing with the most points end up winning. Winning what you ask? Does the winner retire early to some extravagant Caribbean island resort? No, no no! A yet even better fate awaits the two lucky winners: to end up as the poster boy/girl for the AMD64 platform! Nice, Eh? Beats Pina Coladas on any crystalline beach any day. Hard to believe? See it for yourself in the official 'Game Rules' section. I'm just absolutely amazed that there's no NDA surrounding all of this!

If possible, I would like to send you updates while I'm at Sunnyvale running around town, (hopefully) out-smarting others in both U2003 and in general knowledge about AMD-esque technology. It's the least I can do for a company that has given me processor options ever since I found out about alternatives in the x86 market, which in my case was the Am286SX-8Mhz after a brave move from a viciously fast "turbo" XT-compatible NEC V20 based 4.77mhz 8 bit system, but that's a story for another day. To give you a bit of headway about myself, I've been in the IT community for about 10 years now professionally; and since I was a wee tyke as a hobbyist. I used to have an AMD-centric web site called "The Unofficial AMD Technology Site", which I started at the same time as Anand's. It focused on the K5/6 processors of the time, as well as several variant options available (IDT, Cyrix, IBM). I was there when Intel attacked the then floundering TomsHardware site back when the address was http://sysdoc.pair.com and not a directly resolvable DNS name by itself. I was there when the Community came to the rescue ( here's one of my now ancient posts about this issue, straight from the wondrous Deja cache!: here). I, like you friend Magee, come from another time. A time when command prompts were the norm, 300bps modems were all the fad, and the world was a friendlier place - except if you were running Windows 3.1, on which VXD errors had you cursing in languages yet unknown. Anyone remember DOS/4GW extensions? VESA slots? The PCI debacle on which Intel put the future of PCI under the control of what became the PCI SIG? Yes, yes, yes. I was there for all of it.

So after all this time, fancy me winning anything! Heck, I couldn't win a cookie raffle at the local bakery, much less a fully decked out rebadged Opteron dubbed 'Athlon FX 51' with a Asus NF3 Motherboard and 1GB RAM (type still unclear - one would expect 333Mhz ECC DDR because of it's 940 pin count, but who knows - maybe that integrated mem controller on the FX 51 has been tweaked some - or does that NF3 chipset have one of it's own...one can only dream). So then, all I could assume is that I'm part of some quirky cosmological computing error up in the sky. My 15 minutes finally came up. Chalk it up to quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle if need be - I'm on my way to Sunnyvale this Sunday the 21st. 2003 and the Inq will receive news from the front - guaranteed - all assuming that your ready to receive!

I humbly await your response at my inquiry, Disseminator of All that is News, Mr. Mageek.

Cheers

Gerson Ricardo [Go ahead, send me everything! Ed.]

Mike,

Just wanted to say thanks very much for running this article.

I entered the competition and now thanks to the Inquirer I shall be winging my way to SF for the launch.

There's no mention of me having to lay out $630 though (or at least I hope not) I guess the press release you had related to the US promotion.* There were only 5 places available for UK and Germany not the 64 in your article.

Thanks again, and keep up the great work. Might see you there.

Regards
James Cumming

* We didn't get a press release about Area 64. Ed.

Xbox marks the Spot
Lyndon Bulmer seems to have made a fundamental mistake about the X-Box.

The XBox isn't just PC-type technology: it's actual PC technology. Not only that, but the Xbox architecture is essentially a test-case for the trusted computing architecture that MS wants to roll out in the near future. If they aren't already, then expect MS to be advertising the Xbox as a "trusted computing platform" in the next year or so.

Not to mention, the VTEC is probably some kind of single-chip thingy and about as PC-like as a calculator...

Perhaps Lyndon seems to forget, the driving force behind a lot of these Xbox experiments is simply to see if it can be done. It's the same sort of attitude that invented the airplane and the Babbage Logic Engine (technically the first computer, for those that need to know). Fiddling with an Xbox is just another way for nerds to have fun, in the end, and since it also has implications for the trusted computing idea, it deserves its place amongst the tech news.

Graham

P.S. I should add a disclaimer: I don't own and never will own an Xbox, nor have I ever tried installing Linux in one.

HP Airways
A friend of mine works for HP. He's a big guy, 6'2".He'll spend 14 hours on his day off to fly steerage class on Sunday to spend five consecutive 14 hour days dealing with customers. Then he'll fly back on his Saturday, sleep on Sunday to recover from jet lag, and then come in on Monday to do his other day job here in the USA.

He doesn't get a Gulf Stream. He doesn't get a 3 million dollar bonus for laying off tens of thousands of HP employees and shipping their jobs to India. He doesn't get a 3 million dollar bonus for NOT proving that the HP-Compaq merger was successful. But he does get a paycheck which, in this economy, is a bonus for grunts in high-tech .

Well, my friend loves Indian food, so I gave him a bottle of curry to sprinkle on the cafeteria food to wake up on those Mondays that he comes in not quite recovered from Jet lag, sans 3 million dollar bonus in hand, but still holding a job that they haven't figured out how to ship to India.

Now I'm thinking that maybe I'll send Carly a couple of bottles of curry to stock up her two new Gulfstreams so that they too can wake up before someone figures that Indian CEOs work for a fraction of the cost of American CEOs and deliver a superior RoIT. (Return On Intelligent Thought)

Those Gulfstreams must be really comfortable and relaxing, overwhelmingly so, so maybe Carly and friends need to wake up a lot. So if everyone who's job has been shipped to India, and everyone who knows someone who's job got off-shored, and everyone who's job is a candidate for export to India sends Carly a couple of bottles of curry, maybe HP will have some leadership that is wide awake and has a sense of perspective on the meanings of sacrifice, investment and commitment to employees.

Cecil Binks
International Fan of Hysteria