Disney's suicidal DVDs are an environmental disgrace

Will Disney also offer return-on-empty refunds to thwart stockpiles of these things choking landfills with noxious chemicals? Come to think of it, AOL-TW should be held accountable for the millions of CD-ROMs they've shipped which now infest our pits of non-recyclables; I mean, I can only use so many coasters and nouveau art objects.

Suicidal indeed.

Mark J. Hayman

Throw-away society!!!

Ahh, no worries, we can dump it on the Chinese!

Regards

Sven

In a world swimming in its own waste and by all reputable science, on the brink of environmental disaster, do we really need yet another disposable plastic/metal/chemical laced product ???

Disney prides itself on its superficial appearance of a family friendly corporate citizen, yet to actively research another poison product to fill our landfills with clearly demonstrates that their only interest is lining their pockets with sin-tainted money.

Cheers,

Brian Sullivan

Free trade, fair trade
Hynix damaged US memory trade by billions of dollars

Hello Inquirer,

It's breathtaking how hypocritical the yanks can be. With great power comes great responsibility, but lately they've just been behaving more and more like bad bullies (and I'm not even talking about the war here).

"The ITC vote means that a punitive 44.29% tariff will be applied against all and any Hynix chip imports into the United States."

What about them agricultural product subsidies??! That's alright because it's something the US does, themselves. I suppose, potato chips and silicon chips are not created equal. Their farming subsidies are in many ways much more blatant than the Hynix case. (Not that Europe is much better in the subsidy department.)

Am I anti-American? No, not really, just anti stupid American... I do respect many great Americans. I suggest they rename their country "Paradoxia".

So there!

Regards,

Sandor

I think that the american government is going nuts. When they can't compete with a country on a certain product, they tax the foreign product.

Why?

Because it's easier to tax than to find a real solution to the problem. They are just too lazy to do it. They think that they are the best country in the world and that every other country owe them something.

They did the exact same thing to Canada as they do now with South Korea. When they find out our wood was cheaper than their own, and that it was killing their production of wood, they decided to put a tax on the Canadian wood. Canada tried to defend itself and asked for a ruling on behalf of WTO. After more than a year, and a positive ruling from WTO, we are still waiting for a solution, and/or a complete removal of the tax.

So when they talk about "Free trade, fair trade...", they should look at themselves...

They did the same thing also for steel from France (before the confusion on Iraq war).

I think that the US want free trade, if and only if, they are winner in the trade. That's not what I call free trade, fair trade. Right now I call that a monopolistic strategy (remember Intel, Microsoft...).

If they continue to do fair trade the way they do, they will put every country at their back, not a good thing for them right now, seeing the economic situation in the US at the moment.

Vincent Montambault

The AthyWiper 64 is a dud, and huge
AMD Athlon 64 939-pin chips to enter distribution next year

"What's intriguing about this is that the 754 pin AMD 64 processors are single channel, but the 940 pin and the 939 pin Athlon 64s or whatever they'll be called, will be dual channel."

Why is that intriguing?

It's simple - the original AthyWiper 64 is a DUD - and the 939/940 pin versions are simply renamed Flopterons.

Any idiot can see this.

By the way - why don't you let your readers in on a little secret?

The 940 pin Athywiper64 - aka Flopteron - will have a die size of 193 sq. mm !!!

And it will compete with a faster 130 sq mm Pentium 4 Northwood and a much faster 100 sq, mm Pentium ? Prescott.

Maybe you can ask one of your readers what this will do for AMD's BLOOD RED BOTTOM LINE !!!

Hah !!

Don't forget - 15 or 20 screaming diatribe articles about AMD's fsked up AThyWiper64 socket changes are in order - right, Mikey?

Paul R. Engel

This ones for Paul (Paul Argggg. Engel, that is!) I've been listening to his ranting ever since he was a regular on the Silicon Investor message boards, and he hasn't changed a bit, except that it seems to me that there is a note of desperation in his rants these days. He just can't seem to get his head around the fact that the Opteron is competition for the Itanic, not the P4, and if you compare die sizes and cache between those two, the Opteron is MUCH smaller. It's obvious that the only way Intel can get anything out of this "sinking wonder" is by giving it as much cache as can be squeezed onto the die. If this keeps up it won't need any main memory! If you put that much cache on an Opteron it would beat any chip out there right now, easily!

As for the P4, the Athlon is still doing pretty well against it anyway! I work at a company that uses a lot of different processors, and I have sat in front of a P4 3.0Ghz and an Athlon 2.5Ghz, and for some reason the Athlon always "feels" faster - and I have several colleagues that agree 100%. Sure, in some of the benchmarks the P4 "seems" to win, but we all know how good benchmarks are these days. Sitting in front of the same machine for a few weeks tells you a lot more about a processor then any benchmark, IMHO.

Anyway, I have to give Paul a lot of credit for helping AMD along. I find his kind of baseless ranting often helps the underdog more then hurts him. Plus it's always fun to see what he comes up with - for a guy who hates AMD so much, he sure does a lot of thinking about them. I wonder if he has ever actually used an Athlon.....doubtful!

Name supplied

INQ,

Keep up the interesting info and here is a little interesting look at the numbers from the original article of Cray Shows of 40 TFLOPS Opteron-based Red Storm. The last slide of the original article, there is an interesting comparison to show the progress of the industry. The numbers are:

Processors TFLOPS Proc/TFLOPS
9152 1.8 5084.444444 (Intel Pentium Pro 1996)
9632 3.2 3010 (Intel Pentium II Xeon 1997)
6144 3.1 1981.935484 (SGI MIPS 1998)
5808 3.9 1489.230769 (IBM 604e 1998)
8192 12.3 666.0162602 (IBM Power 3 2001)
8160 20.5 398.0487805 (Alpha EV68 2002)
10368 40 259.2 (AMD Opteron 2004)

An interesting item is somehow this Opteron-based supercomputer outperforms the Alpha EV68 supercomputer by requiring only 65% of the number of processors per TFLOP. The other thing is that there is a 95% drop in the number of processors per TFLOP in 8 years.

It would be interesting to see the costs of these systems too so an analysis could be done on a $/TFLOP basis.

Just my $0.02.

Greg Barber