You are an insult to social responsibility

Sirs,

You are an insult to social responsibility. Your comment about making Tony Blair a US citizen was beyond insult. I am a loyal American, who appreciates the sacrifices our British partners have made in the quest for world peace. I would be very much surprised sir that you have ever served in your armed forces. Rather, it would seem you make you (sic) silly living, wagging your irresponsible left-wing tongue. Clearly, you have limited world vision. But, I suspect you will change your mind if some "Hussein or Al Queda type" slips some arsenic or like into you [sic] drinking water.

Personally, I would be proud to have Tony Blair as a US citizen. Most of us appreciate him more than you do. You don't know how luck (sic) you are by having him as PM. Hopefully, you will in the future.

Larry J Reynolds

[ Blair, Straw, Campbell, Hoon in the line of fire]

Apple fans heat to incandescence
Alpha was first to power 64-bit PC desktops and Apple splutters after man says AMD first to 64-bit desktop

While I'm also a big fan of Alpha, if you're looking for 64-bit 'desktops' there are some other candidates.

The Apollo DN1000.

And some flavor of the ardent/stellar/stardent family *might* have been. It's hard to find documentation anymore. But someone at Apple will know:

See here.

Name supplied

While the DEC and most of the other OEM's desktop offerings were really workstations, there was a company Enorex ture Alpha based PC, they started up in 1997. Enorex was part of the same company that sold systems under the Quantex, Pionex and Cybermax names. I think the company closed shop in 2000 or maybe 2001.

"Enorex Microsystems graced Digital Semiconductor's AlphaPowered booth with its $2,699 Value Ultra PC 366e, a 32MB, 2.5GB short-tower desktop equipped with a 12X CD-ROM, floppy drive, Matrox Millenium 3D video card, keyboard, mouse, and WNT 4.0 Workstation. Equipped with a 433 MHz Alpha CPU, the system is $2,999; a 500 MHz version costs $3,749. Enorex also showed its Professional Ultra PC, which features 64MB RAM, 4.3GB UltraWide SCSI disk drive, Matrox graphics, and an Adaptec 2940 UltraWide SCSI-3 Controller. Prices range from $3,849 (366 MHz) and $4,149 (433 MHz) to $4,799 (500 MHz).

Enorex is at www.enorex.com or 800-419-4946."

See also here

Bruce Harris

I don't really think you could call that a personal computer. A Windows NT workstation, yes, but not a PC.

I'll miss the Alpha, we just took our last one offline

Tony

OS X is a consumer OS

Previous 64bit systems were workstations and servers, not for consumer usage.

What a waste of bandwidth.

Dave 17

Thank goodness someone has mentioned this.

I can only laugh (hard and loud BTW) at all this current squabbling over who is the first to have a 64-bit desktop, since I've been using an Alpha desktop since January 1998.

And I know there are plenty of others out there who can quote dates prior to that.

Oh, and I should perhaps mention that it has been running as part of a VMS cluster all that time, the only noticeable outages in that time being due to network problems.

Paul Sture

Hi Mike. I wouldn't normally spam your inbox for something so trivial, but I can no longer go without comment on Apple's claim to have released "the first 64-bit desktop". Does anyone actually believe this? It's not even relevant that AMD has another 64-bit box shipping right now.

In 1995 DEC built these little Alpha boxes called "Multias". The DEC Multia used (you guessed it) a 64-bit 21066 (or 21066A/21068) Alpha AXP CPU. When running Windows NT Workstation, they were generally running 32-bit software, but the other OS for which they were designed (Linux) was available as pure 64-bit implementation. The other name for the Multia, which was used when marketed for Linux was (and I couldn't possibly have made this up) the "Universal Desktop Box". It seem unlikely that they had some other, non-desktop intention for it.

An Apple-oriented reader could probably argue that Alphas weren't mainstream, but I would find that argument a little peculiar coming from an Apple advocate. :-)

I'm sure some other similarly semantic reader will find still earlier 64-bit desktop, but it's clear that neither Apple nor AMD are first.

Regards,

Name supplied

Byrds founder to sue Microsoft over Eight Miles High

The notes D B G A can be transposed to C A F G or to any chord, of course. You just move your fingers one key down the keyboard. And the progression of these four notes is the most common variation of the chord progression at the heart of all modern music, C G G, which can be transposed to D G A, or D B G A by moving your fingers back up the keyboard one key. Any judge who would back Roger McGuinn on this one would have to ignore, literally, thousands of songs of prior art. That is, the judge would have to render himself as pompous and ignorant as Roger McGuinn. And so would the appellate judges. Roger's chances of persuading the US court system to do this are somewhat less than the chance that a snowball has in hell.

Roger's just reminding us again that when he was the last standing member of the five original Byrds, still calling himself the Byrds, that the other four members had a different opinion about the wisdom of continuing to work with Roger than he had about continuing to work with them.

Oh, Roger, by the way, how 'bout those lyrics in Turn! Turn! Turn! ? I bet you're glad that the countless, nameless people of ancient history who developed and embellished those ancient literary traditions of ages past never bothered to conceive of a system of payments every time a story of life was told by old people to young people. If they had, the young people would have paid admission fees over and over again to listen to the maintainers of those oral traditions and you'd be paying royalties on that song to the descendents of people who lived thousands of years ago, i.e., virtually every person on the face of the earth.

It gets pretty darn weird when you decide that everybody in the world should pay you money every time four exceedingly common consecutive notes are played together. Is McGuinn crazy, greedy or both? One could care, I suppose.

Gene Mosher