Intelactual solidarity

You said.

"He adds that it's unlikely that server customers will switch to the Itanium now either."

I said.

"It is not apparent to me that Intel has proven the need for IA-64, or that all of today's server customers could ever be switched over to Itanium processors."

The correct summary for what I said would be that it's unlikely that all server customers will switch. [We'll do the summarising thank you very much Peter, Ed.]

Yours in solidarity for intellectual honesty,

Peter Glaskowsky

Singapore puts Draconian thumbscrews on PC use

Hi Mike,

This article proves to be an interesting factual read. It represents yet another piece of accurate reporting of the already excellent Inquirer. However, please kindly allow me to explain some of the simple reasons I can think of behind each "control/enforcement" put in place by our government. As a Singaporean, I sometimes feel that these laws are harsh, but they are indeed necessary for the survival of Singapore as a nation.

"LEGISLATORS IN Singapore have passed a law that will allow the government to jail people who it believes are using computers and endangering its national security. The amendment to the existing law means the government will monitor all computer activity and take action against them if it wants to. And the government can also make organisations and individuals take action on its behalf. But according to local rag the Straits Times, the chairman of the Ministry of the Interior, Chin Tet Yung, said that law abiding people need have no fear. The law would only be used in special circumstances and ordinary people need not worry their little noddles or waste their brain cells thinking about things like this."

Singapore is a small nation (682.7 sq km, slightly more than 3.5 times the size of Washington, DC ). Because of our limited land size, Singapore has no natural resources and not much land to talk about. Technology is the only way our country can stay ahead in the economic race. It takes only one major incident to ruin Singapore's image as a country successful financial and banking center. The laws are in place to be a deterrent for would be offenders. Even if things do get ugly, our government at least have an avenue to prosecute the offender to the fullest extent of the law.

"Is Singapore a police state? No. It's run by self serving politicians like many another state, who give orders to the police."

Our police work based on existing laws and are not above the laws enacted.

"To show it's a paragon of democratic virtue, it recently relaxed laws that prevented you chewing gum, although you still can't go to certain web sites that the government doesn't want you to, obviously for your own good."

Amazing, the reason why the chewing gum was banned was due an idiotic Singaporean whom stuck his piece of gum on the doors of our train system (Mass Rapid Transit - MRT) or your Tube equivalent and cause massive delays/disruptions to the system. While I do feel ashamed of this fellow countryman, it seems that this may yet be a blessing in disguise, for I have yet to step/got stuck on any gum for years since the ban was put into place. Just to set the record straight, our Police force do not arrest you for chewing on gum, our law just prevent import and sale of chewing gum. Our people still have access to limited supplies of gum from neighbouring Malaysia for personal consumption.

Singapore, being a largely Asian society, we are still fairly conservative when it comes to pornography etc. While it is true that some obvious sites (like www.playboy.com) are blocked/shielded from the eyes of the average Singaporean, this is merely to discourage people from the viewing of such content. Most other sites are still accessible to be viewed. I myself have not yet encountered any site (e.g. politcally, sexually oriented, except obvious porn sites) which is blocked from my Internet access.

"But a recent Amnesty International report said that opposition parties in Sinhapura (correct spelling is Singapura), "The Lion Town", are underfunded, the Internal Security Act allows indefinite detention without trial. The press is is restricted, it jails Jehovah Witnesses, it canes people, and even peaceful demonstrators can be jailed.

"It uses "civil defamation suits" to silence the opposition, which can result in huge fines. Conscientious objectors who reject military service are jailed".

The main reason why Singapore is still peaceful although it is a multi-racial country is largely due to the controls of the press. As a small nation, we cannot allow any radical thinker to be overly expressive in their views published to the world+dog to see. This might undermine or destroy the racial harmony which our country has achieved and maintain over the years since the racial riots in 1964. As a small nation (without ample land and any natural resources), our people (only 4.6 million including foreign talents) are our only resource and we need to coordinate our efforts in order to earn a place in this world. A restricted press allows our government to direct (brainwash :P) our people to work as one entity for the common good. This I feel is a must must for the survival of the nation in the long run.

Regarding the "Civil defamation suits" to silence the opposition," is the only part of this article that I disagree upon. Most of the time, the opposition fails to make valid statements about the government and/or are seeking to undermine a government which so far has brought peace, stability and prosperity to the nation. (If you're talking about Dr Chee Soon Juan and his political party). You may feel that it is not democratic, but somehow, I would not sacrifice all things I take for granted in my life now (peace, stability and prosperity) just be mellow and give support to a party which had not brought anything but trouble.

Because of our limited population, Singapore does not enjoy the luxury of choice for military defence. Therefore each and every Singaporean male is conscripted and must shoulder the responsibility of protecting Singapore in the event of foreign aggressors. Jehovah Witnesses are jailed due to their religion forbidding them to bear arms, in the light of equal responsibilities, they are unable to fulfill this national responsibilties and therefore pay the penalty by being jailed. This may seem harsh to you but if anyone who want to avoid military service.... you get the picture?

I hope this clear up certain misconceptions about Singapore and hope you can kindly show Singapore in a better light. The harsh laws that are in place may seem draconic to your society, but they are definitely neccessary to govern a small unique country such as Singapore. After all not all things are created equal.

Regards
Jeffrey Boey

Why will nVIDIA not play by the rules?

nVIDIA PR director claims that they wrote specific code to enable the "compiler" because game developers (and I quote) "Game developers LOVE this - they work with us to make sure their code is written in a way to fully exploit the compiler." However, the vast majority of 3D games are not written to any nVIDIA-specific compiler. They are written to DirectX or even OpenGL general specifications. They do not run on some irritating proprietary optimized code path. Futuremark was not written with this optimization which next to nobody is going to follow either. So nVIDIA in their deviousness decided that if Futuremark wouldn't optimize for them, they'd optimize for Futuremark.

No way, it doesn't work that way. If that compiler can't run on any given Direct3D or OpenGL game without any special optimization for the card, then it's worthless garbage, period.

Note that if nVIDIA decided to hire a few hundred programmers and create similar optimizations for 90% of the 3D games that hit store shelves, then they would have a valid point, since they then only did for Futuremark what they would be willing to do for every other game title in the world. But they tend to only do their own optimizing for major benchmarks or games that are used as major benchmarks. (Gee, I wonder why?)

Name supplied

Hi Mike,

Just read about the MPAA stuff and the proposed, "Artists' Rights" act.

Wouldn't it be nice if:

People support this type of thing IF the individual artists vote on EACH case, as to whether or not each offending individual should go to jail for watching a movie the artist is in.

Then people could simply boycott any movie that actor/actress performs in, during the duration of the fan's jail time.

Same for the RIAA...any money collected should go to the actual artists, and NOT the companies and trade associations.

(You steal a John Doe song, he gets to decide if you have to pay thousands of dollars to John Doe, NOT Columbia Records, the producer, the lawyer, the RIAA, the distributor, the advertising rep, the store that sells the record, or whomever.) Similar to above, the boycott of that artist would be for the duration of time it takes for boycotts of the album to equal that paid by the offending fan.)

AND wouldn't it be nice if:

During the duration of those boycotts, ANY senator or congressman or president who supported and voted for such stupid laws have boycotts of people voting for them.

It would feel like we had a democracy, run by individuals. Gee, aren't we supposed to have that already?

J

Why Microsoft wants to buy - then trash - Google

"Search Google for Linux Windows That gets you about 14 million pages, even with the English preference or filter turned on. Now, got to msn.com and search the Microsoft way for the same two words."

If I go to advanced search and pick "any of the words" instead of "words in the title" I get :

1-15 of about 35769869 containing "linux windows

Maybe the default MSN search is for "words in the title".

Why do you waste our time with morons and their stupid paranoid ramblings about Microsoft. It makes your site look dumb.

Bruce

I got 376 very relevant links for Linux using msn search sure it was not 18 million but direct links to major Linux sites seem to be enough. no need to reply you can if you want but what I am saying is ms is a big greedy hog but don't confuse greed for stupidity.

Brett J

At first when I read this, I was shocked myself. I went to google and conducted the search as prescribed. Google returned 9.68 million pages. My next stop was MSN. Now, at first glance, it only displays 18 results and lists 1-15 on the first page of the results. However, if one clicks at the bottom to the next page, the real tally is returned of just under 9 million pages. The same search through yahoo returns 10.5 million. Rather than 'The EBIL M$' not actually displaying websites and withoulding information, it is more likely just an error in the code that displayes an incorrect search result on the first page. A search for just 'Linux' itself seems to return less than five hundred responses from MSN, but when one clicks next towards the last page, the number skyrockets into the millions. More than these being an anti-open source tactic from Microsoft, it seems to simply be a bug in the results display. Just thought I would send this in as it seems terribly wrong that a company would do something like block certain search results from coming back, and, in this instance, Microsoft is innocent of all charges.

Benjamin A. Brock

He's right, it's absolutely amazing. And it's not just on msn either. I couldn't get to msn.com, and figured I would use the search bar that came with my Internet Explorer. I use Opera, so I was surprised that it didn't go to msn.com, but instead did a search using Websearch.com, of all places. I've never heard of them, but they do metasearches apparently, and the results were astounding. I typed in Linux, and got similar results across the board. Altavista: 5 pages. Metasearch Picks: 10 results. Looksmart: 5 pages. Webcatalog: 5 pages. Yahoo!: 10 pages. At this point, this was too hard to believe, so I did a deeper search: Yahoo.com found 18,500,000 pages, so the IE-direct link was misleading at best. However, my original theory was not compleatly off: Google found 90,000,000 pages. So there might be a little intimidation going on. At any rate, keep on reporting. You guys do an absolutely amazing job, a refresing voice of sanity in an industry that so often takes itself far to seriously.

Joe Lalli

"To all the users of msn and its so-called "search" feature, I have to say, wake up & smell the coffee, kids."

Hmm... Doesn't he know that kids don't like coffee? ;)

Regards,

Richard

I search for Windows and Linux on msn search engine and I got over 14 million pages for it. I don't know how you got 18 pages. Are you sure you type it right?

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Linux+Windows

Having read the article "Why Microsoft wants to buy - then trash - Google", I did the same exercise with "Jessica Lynch" (the only reason being that she's in the news at the moment).

The results were:

MSN search - 47
Google search - 125,000

So what are we supposed to deduce from this - that Microsoft sees Jessica Lynch as a threat to their operations?

Ed

Every few days I hear another story or editorial on Intel's Yamhill and AMD's X86-64, while this is interesting to see others points of view I would like to share my two cents.

Intel's design and marketing of their 64-bit technology will be based off of what will make Intel the most money while proving competitive performance versus AMD's offering at each price point.

Taking the preceding into consideration one would assume (everyone know what happens when you assume) that Intel would base their 64-bit elements off of their Itanium design. This allows Intel to build on the library of software for their IA-64 so it doesn't suffer the full penalty of a normal32-bit application. Also this help validate the Itanium design and its technology to the mainstream.

The second part one has to consider is if Intel adopts AMD's x86-64 that gives AMD a very strong recommendation for Intel and validates that AMD is a top contender to the mainstream markets. This would open doors for AMD into markets Intel has owned without question. This would boost AMD's sales and allow AMD to sell chip at volume with higher price points with no performance increase and cost to them. That would prove a massive blow to Intel's market share and more importantly Intel's image.

No longer would AMD be the design copier who has integrated all Intel's major instructions MMX, SSE, and SSE2, and has to depend on Intel's compiliers, but a company that also innovates the industry just as much as Intel.

So what is going to happen? I don't know. But I will place a bet its whatever Intel's brain trust thinks it can use to bring in more profit and tarnish AMD's x86-64 in any way it can to boost its own image. Dirty… yes Cheap…. Yes but when billions of dollars are on the line my moral would wave too.

Victor Miller

Absolutely Fabtastic

Dear sir,

I am responding to Dr Peter Reeves-Hall's letter regarding AMD opening a new fab in Wales. May I propose that an even better location would in be Scotland. After all we now have two fabs lying dormant; NEC's 6inch and 8inch lines in Bathgate, West Lothian and the ex Hyundai now Motorola (8 inch) fab in Dunfermline, Fife. The Scotland Central-Belt, the ill fated “Silicon Glen” also have a large experienced workforce (mainly those laid off at NEC and the companies supporting the fab) as well as having facilities like Shinetsu located nearby to supply wafers.

Please AMD, come to Scotland!

Signed
Ex-NEC employee
(Note to editor, please could you withhold my email address)

so, which came first? hmmm....

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031106.wnigescam1106/BNStory/International/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/33851.html

coincidental similarities...?