Woman spotted on INQ Letters Page

Subject: Open Sauce

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/OPENSOURCE/

I found this petition and felt that it was well worth while signing, I suspect that a good proportion of UK based enquirer readers would feel likewise. I am dissapointed in the person that created it for not publicising it, but with only a few days left I think a short story in theinquirer could at least make the number of petitioners respectable.

Best regards,
Finn

Subject: Vista hates a lot more than only shoot' em ups

Hello Nick,

Vista doesn't hate shoot' em ups alone. Vista hates a lot more.

I'm currently testing Vista, still a few weeks to go before my testperiod is over, but I haven't gotten everything in working order.

I you watch movies at YouTube, the sound stutters. If you download a movies and watch it local (divx, mpeg,...) and your hard drive tries to read something, the sound stutters.

WinAmp doesn't have any low sounds (2.1 or 5.1 sound). It's always stereo, but I have those small satelite speakers which need the .1. Windows Mediaplayer does the same thing.

In WOW there is only stereo, it's the only game I play for the moment. I used my onboard sound. It's a RealTek 850 chip. I found some vista drivers for it and then I could select my 5.1 speaker setup. But this didn't change a thing. Windows knows my speakers and when I test them I hear them all. But Mediaplayer still doesn't like my setup, neither does Winamp or WOW.

Thanks to an upgrade to an Creative X-Fi card I have better sound in Mediaplayer. But in Winamp it's still a no go. The same for YouTube or other movies.

Thanks to ALchemy from Creative I have great sound in WOW. (thank you)

But Microsoft made a mess with the new audio-stack. It send us 10years back in time. The new audio-stack which lacks hardware acceleration is the culprit. I hope the fix it fast. It's no fun like this.

Kind regards,
Tom

Subject: The INQ goes on the trail of Chinese pirates

I think it would be decent and polite to make the people in the pictures unrecognisable, if a much-read site like the inq does an article like this the cops might for international PR purposes crack down on them, and the point of the article is to show the reality of how all china has nothing but 'piracy' and not to bother individuals isn't it.

How would you feel if the people you photographed were put in jail or such just because you become part in the PR efforts? I hope you would feel like an ass and failure, I know I would. Be a journalist, not a snitch/cop.

Sincerely,
W

Subject: FUD

I've been using Vista Ultimate 64 since building a new PC four weeks ago and have none of the reported issues. Installation was smooth, drivers were all available, apart from the now infamous 8800 drivers from NVIDIA.

Since installing the unsigned beta 100.59 drivers I can report 8503 '06 3DMarks in Vista compared to 8554 3DMarks in XP.

Real world games: Call of Duty 2 runs the same as XP, Quake 4 runs marginally better in Vista as far as I can tell, Half Life 2 and all its mods, including Lost Coast, all run the same as XP. So Vista hates shoot 'em ups? Boy, that's news to me. Other games I've tested include ToCA 3, GTR2 and GT Legends (granted they're basically the same engine) and they all run the same as they do in XP.

Overall gaming in Vista, even on my supposedly driver-crippled 8800GTS, is *fine*. The *ONLY* thing I'm missing in Vista from XP is the ability to overclock my 8800 through the drivers, which is costing me 1000 3DMarks or a few FPS in-game.

Spanisharmada

Subject: Alpha

Hi Mike,

Nice to hear from you we will run the same processorsup to 2025. But, hmm are you right?. We have life cycle of 5 years for each new processors. That means how many more iterations? 2012, 2017, 2022. Three more? Seems plausible.

However, take in account sad fact (you missed) that there is no space for future performance growth. Today's minimum is dual core. In generation 2012 it will be 4 or 8 cores. So, no space for performance growth after that date, because 8 core is already diminishing performance return design.

But we migh have after growth in lower power consumption and core miniaturization. Provided that we got a brakthrough like high-K metal transistors is scalable enough. Thus, you are right and you are wrong at the same time. More at:

badhardware

And don't forget that air forced cooling is unbeatable processor advantage

here

Regards,
Adi

Subject: Vista---never ending story

Good morning,

got it a week ago and surpisingly I am quite happy with it. Ok, on the driver side it is still quite shitty (almost anything I tried via USB was not recognized, not even a HDD) and I am still quite pissed I bought a X-Fi, but games run really fine. BF2142 gives me the same frames as in XP. And have not even got any high spec box, just a mere 805D with 2 GB and a old 6800GT.

Maybe it is because of some tweaking peoples do ? Or maybe because almost all diaappointed gamers run some flavour of the home version ? 64 Bit Ulimate version runs it all very good, have not found one game it would not run at all, but have not tried my old pre-2000 ones yet.

Vole did a great job this time, all those mowning seem to have forgotten what happened when 95,98,2000 and XP came out. This baby is stable and on the drivers side the manufacters are to blame once again :-D

Best regards from Munich
WoenK

Subject: 64 million smart phones ship

..to 64 million stupid people.

Bandy

Subject: x86 are alpha now

besides venting, was there a real point here? obviously, x86 ISA hasn't come to resemble alpha at all. neither has the system arch, really, though this is what I guess you're talking about: that around 2008, intel will join amd in rejoicing in an on-chip dram controller. of course, most alphas didn't have that - only the barely-produced ev7.

also, why do you think there's any problem with an OS using 80 threads? linux on an altix, for instance, does quite respectably with more, and IPC for it is far more painful than it would be on a single chip such as intel's mesh demo.

apps, that's a completely different story. apps are often still inherently serial, or at least have significant serial sections. remember amdahl's law to see why the 80-core chip isn't practical. (and consider that the chip doesn't have 80 dram interfaces.)

the alpha was all about a big-view balancing of all levels of architecture, from RTL-level microarchitecture to full-system packaging challenges. intel/amd only do that in a very limited sense.

hahn

Subject: x86 like alpha

Mr. Magee, don't make me angry...you wouldn't like me when I'm angry...(sorry, I'm sure you've heard that line from the TV series way too many times; I just don't know many Magee's)...

But I'm sure saying x86 processors are all Alpha makes sense to you, but I'm not sure how you mean it. Alpha chips didn't run x86 programs which was a major hindrance. Processor compatibility is important -- look how much more Apple has caught on, and gotten press since they moved to Intel chips.

Yes -- the 80-core chips seem extreme -- just like 640K (mem) was claimed by software geek, Bill Gates to be more than anyone would ever need.

You seem to harp on 80 cores on one chip being overkill because our current OS's can't take advantage of them. Or that more is not necessarily "better"...would 80 brain cells be enough for a human? Is it the case that more than 80 brain cells or, even, more than an IQ of 80 isn't necessarily better?

Right now, "memory" is the limiting factor. If those 80 cores can share enough full speed cache -- heck, 80 chips x "how many general purpose registers/chip"? = how much computing space? Maybe we need to think in trillions of registers on a chip -- all moving at "full speed" -- NO CLOCK. Operations are taken and used as soon as the previous processors have produced the result. Speed would be limited by #of cores in a specific "locality" -- answers would stop being "binary" and become "fuzzy" based on time given to propagate answers from farther cores or farther groups of cores.

Such setups _might_ not be as useful in computing PI to quadrillions of decimal places, but they might start being used to "think"?

Unfortunately, Intel cannot control iconoclasts like Torvalds or Gates who wield total or strong control over their respective domains -- when computer OS's aren't limited to the designs of a few individuals we might make forward progress. Intel is "just" a hardware company. The dominance of the major OS's and market forces (the capitalistic system) work to maintain the status quo. It may take a while before factors and systems stronger than the capitalist system move individuals and companies beyond the current stepwise-slow evolutionary paradigm.

Just like the current free market system is being shown to produce more "lifestyle" and "non-cure" drugs in the pharma industry (because drugs that cure get used and put on the shelf -- people don't need them daily), market forces also work to stymie radical growth in the computer industry.

More cores may not look better until non-market forces can come up with paradigms that will seem useless at first -- I.e. how useful are 1-celled animals like amoebas? Hopefully it won't take billions of years of evolution, but I doubt such changes will happen as fast as 1 fertilized egg-cell can grow to become a useful or talented human -- even there, look at how many models are failures there...;^)

Linda W

Subject: X86 chips

Mike,

The bigger issue of multiprocessors is the invitation to developers to slop applications together which burn through CPU cycles. I don't doubt that code efficiency which is already suspect with some application developers will go completely out the window(s).

Whatever the core CPU count, someone had better work on matching the memory capacities. Who cares if you have multiple cores, if they are spread across minimum of overpriced memory.

Rich

Subject: The OS world.

Everyone has been talking about great OSX, XP, or sometimes even Linux is; and of course no one could forget Charlie's rants about Vista (that was Charlie right?). The truth is, which Operating System is the best out there? Answer: none of them. Why? None of them really take advantage of all that computing power under the hood.

Several years back I demanded someone make me an OS exactly what I wanted it for. Something completely native in DX or OGL and took NO resources to run. I didn't need any fancy 2d graphics, print drivers, access lists, or start menus; just simple I type one thing, run game.exe and my game runs, at blazing fast speed.

Some of us are glad the days of DOS and command interface is gone, but how much system resources did DOS take? Now how about Vista? Even XP or OSX; what are they doing with all that RAM anyways?

In this day and age, is it really all that difficult to program some OS that does something simple and fast? Even some of the Linux or Open Sauce OS's out there are I suppose, nice, but it's not like they are blazing fast for games, especially DX.

So my question is, besides the too many rhetorical ones, where are all the innovators out there? Do me a favor, either haxor Window XP and add native DX10 for me, cut Vista's code down by 75% and make it runnable on say, 256MB of ram, or make Windows games run equally fast on OSX (if it goes open market) or Linux (DAAMT/Nvida make some drivers!).

If someone can do this, when I rule the world I will reward you with 72 virgins and a Applebee's dinner with the Omnipotent Being of choice.

alexi stukov

Subject: Death of nVidia??

Why would this be the death of nVidia?? They are working on their own concepts of a CPU and they may fuse their GPUs with their CPUs, or even better, they can go with multi-core concepts as well.

And anyone expecting Intel who are absolute trash cans in the graphics business to do well right out of the box when they come out with their GPUs, is really exaggerating by a an awfully wide margin. And besides by the time they come out with their alleged 16 times faster card than the G80, no ones sitting still. By then the G90 and R700 will be equally faster than the "old dead" G80/R600s.

I expect Intel to fail miserably like they always have, and they dont have the years of discrete graphics experience to go with it.

And with the Chinese and Russians coming out with their CPU architectures, Intel AMD and Nvidia have a hard time ahead in the next 10 years to come. Intel will be extinct in the near future as the dominant force, there will be many competitors out there.

Mclaren Walley

Subject: Vista pricing in Ireland

Hi,

You might get a story out of the prices Moduslink is charging for shipping of Windows Vista Home Premium to Irish customers in comparison to customers in other European countries. Most countries it's charged at 18, for Ireland it's 69.83.

I've included a table of prices across Europe below.

	Cyprus	Finland	France	Germany	Greece	Ireland	Italy	Malta	Spain	UK
Shipping	€69.83	€18.00	€18.00	€18.00	€18.00	€69.83	€18.00	€69.83	€18.00	€18.00
Taxes/Duties	€13.97	€3.96	€3.53	€3.42	€3.42	€14.66	€3.60	€13.97	€2.88	€3.15
Total	€83.80	€21.96	€21.53	€21.42	€21.42	€84.49	€21.60	€83.80	€20.88	€21.15

Noticed this while putting an upgrade through for a customer, I'll be holding off on doing it until the price hopefully goes down if some pressure is brought to bear on MS/Moduslink

Best Regards,

Conor

Subject: Eve online

sorry if you have already had this lot spammed to you.

Basicallly, it appears that the hacker (and it was a hacker who broke into a forum for one of the eve clans) was correct all along, and the majority of the eve populace aren't happy about it.

The thing that bugs me isn't that he cheated, its' the one rule for team A, one for team B attitude, and the lack of tranparanency by the GM's thats fuelling the unrest in the eve player community. It's a shame, because eve is a great game (well, apart form the crappy bugs, one took a 100 page thread over a ayear before the bug was fixed) have a read of this lot

http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=424
http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=423
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=473335

I'm sure you have the rest.

goodnight, and I'll try not to mail you again when i'm drunk :)

D W Gray

Subject: Video may break the Interweb

yeah yeah and tv will fry your brain and automobiles at 20mph are so fast the shock of acceleration will break your neck... we've heard it all before

saschakrohn