INQUIRER "a pot calling a kettle black"

RUSS WRITES, apropos the piece by Fernando Cassio:

Hi Guys,

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9493 c.f. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9561

"This continues the recent trend of charging for everything. Let's see... CNN wants $4.95 a month for the privilege of seeing their "CNN Newspass" video streams, the NY Times wants $2.95 for EACH ARTICLE you read from their archive... TheEconomist.com wants $19.95 a month for access to their online archive!!. Hey, that's not fair, suddenly you need a lot of money! "

Ehm... like the Inquirer's Flash-free subscription service. To be honest I understand the need for adverts, but hate flash so I don't have Flash installed on my PC.

I bet you don't get many people who like paying as much as they hate moaning though!

Cheers
Russ - he uses a real email address

Yeah right Russ. Get it right and look at some company accounts. First of all, it's an ad-free service, not a flash free service. That means a lot to journalists and publishers but little to others. If you've ever had a publisher trying to tell you "Oh, can't you be a little nicer to xyxabc, you'd understand the difference", Mike Magee

Fresh worm arrives to bug us

Ye newe viruse brings down two government departments

My network received dozens of emails coming from support@microsoft.com with the W32/Palyh@MM virus in them. We use Messagelabs and they have stopped each one. I haven't looked into the headers but the subject says 'Your password'. Someone is either playing games, or MS is infected!

Sample of email

The MessageLabs SkyScan Anti-Virus service discovered a possible virus or unauthorised code (such as a joke program or trojan) in an email sent to or from your organisation.

This email has now been quarantined and was not delivered.

To help identify the quarantined email:

The message sender was

support@microsoft.com

Name, email address supplied

Single CPU Opterons whether you like it or not

In "Single CPU Opterons, whether you like it or not", Burt Carver trumpets the fact that it took two days to port DB2 to x86-64, and a week to port Unreal Tournament. The statements are at best meaningless, and at worst, misleading.

I have ported a *lot* of software over the years. Porting effort depends on many things, including the quality of the code you're starting with, its porting "history," and the target operating system, compilers, and libraries. Moving from 32 to 64 bits must be done carefully, but the changes one makes generally have *nothing* to do with instruction set! (Exception: assembly language source code, but that's inherently non-portable to begin with.) In other words, it doesn't matter if your first port to 64 bits is Itanic, x86-64, SPARC V9, Alpha, or PowerPC-64 (or whatever IBM calls it). You do the work to accomplish it. After that first one, moving to the second 64-bit platform will be easy, except figuring out which compiler options to use and how to work around OS, compiler, and library bugs. That's where the fun *really* begins.

IBM has already ported DB2 to a diverse set of platforms, including one or more with a 64 bit instruction set architecture. It doesn't surprise me that they can do a basic port to x86-64 in a few days (i.e., compile it and maybe run a few tests). They probably did all the 32- to 64-bit work two ports ago (maybe on the one to Itanic!). Now they have to ferret out all the problems that aren't in their code, but in the target platform. I'm sure just running and rerunning their full regression test suite will take weeks. If the target is Windows Server, I suspect that there will be some issues that neither IBM nor AMD can do much about...

Read Fleming
Email address supplied

Has Nvidia dodged one puddle to land in another?

>Re-evaluate, re-evaluate

It's a known fact that the emergence of a new Microsoft DX version and the appearance of software that uses it are events that take places at least a year to eighteen months apart. Given this, it might be a smart idea not to bother building the full features of a new DirectX version into a first-generation low-end part. Would anyone really complain if the GeForce4 Ti 4200 became Nvidia's sub-$100 part for the next six months? The GeForce4 MX caught heavy flak because by the time it was introduced Nvidia had already established a top-to-bottom line of GeForce3 cards that all had DX8 compatibility, only to intro a GF4 card that didn't. By the time NV40 is introduced it'll be close to DX9's real debut in the open market and a fully DX9 / CineFX supporting part will make a lot more sense.

You've forgot about the chicken and the egg problem. Developers won't release DirectX 9 games until a substantial portion of users have DirectX 9 capable cards. If Nvidia (or whoever) limits the DirectX 9 features that their cards have, then it will take developers even longer to finally introduce Directx 9 games.

First generation cards with new features are rarely able to use those features anyways. Look at the Geforce1. It's great new feature was T&L. By the time T&L games finally came out, the Geforce1 was barely fast enough to run them decently. New high end cards can have the same problem... I've never heard anyone complain that the geforce1 was a piece of crap in it's time ;)

Ian Mills
Email address supplied