You press people are like "vultures on the kill" with Sun

It's ironic how when a company has had a few bad quarters you press folks are like vultures on the kill, further driving it into oblivion. It's amazing how the press can turn a decent company turning around into dead meat.

Sun has excellent products and an excellent value proposition story. Why can't you focus on talking about the products instead of beating a dead horse to death with their financials? Customers will surely buy into your doom and gloom reports, further hurting the company, regardless of hell well it's trying to get out of its current misfortunes. Do you have a personal agenda with Sun you care to share with your readers?

With a massive installed base and its investments in open technologies like Java, Sun is truly in a unique position to making a difference in the technology world where its competitors continue to say "lets all be the same and sell the same stuff". Why not ask Sun's competitors what their value proposition is and then compare that to Sun's? That would be decent commentary to write about.

You press people make me sick.

Another disappointed reader
Name not supplied, email address supplied

DDR2 memory will start off costly and slow

Mike,

After reading the Inq article: "DDR Memory Will Start Off Costly and Slow"

I feel most of the insights in the article to be right on. However, the comments about how the Opteron/Athon64 memory controller plays into the mix needs some clarification. After reading this Athlon64 overclocking guide:

See here.

In summary:

1. On AMD's architecture, Memory/CPU Core/Hypertransport are **ALWAYS** out of sync.
2. There is an internal clock called "HTT" which drives all other clocks
3. Hypertransport speed = HTT * multiplier
4. CPU Core = HTT * different multiplier
5. Memory Speed = CPU Core / another divider

These multipliers/dividers are not available in all BIOS, or all overclocking utilities. In the overclocking article, the best results came from finding the highest HTT speed each subsystem can handle individually, and then setting the other multipliers/dividers accordingly. The author uses a combination of BIOS and the Clockgen utility to access the three multipliers/dividers. I was quite impressed by the results, and I'm surprised that more reviewers haven't used this method.

IMHO, this architecture leaves AMD in a much better position than Intel. It can always utilize the best available hardware (e.g. Memory) without being limited by the impact to other subsystems. Hypertransport can ramp speed independently too.

Cheers
John

Taxes in New York

Hi Mike,

In NY, there has always been a "supposed to" collection of sales tax on purchases made in other states but shipped to NY. (If the seller has a storefront or building in NY, then the seller always had to collect sales tax. If the seller did not, he either could, or leave it up to the customer to pay "use tax" to NY State.) Most customers never paid "use tax."

How is that relevant to computers?

Many years ago, in the early days of microcomputers such as TRS-80, Apple, IBM PC, people bought computers in stores. These stores collected sales taxes.

Along came Gateway selling computers from South Dakota. They were MUCH cheaper AND didn't charge sales tax. I remember the first purchase I made from them for a client...friends teased me saying I was buying computers made by cows.

Gradually, many people started buying mail order to avoid tax. Computer stores started going out of business. At some point, NY started making Gateway collect sales taxes because they started selling "in home" tech support, thus doing business in the state. People switched to the mail order competition, Dell, who didn't have to collect sales tax, and didn't pay the tax.

But this year, NY and some other states, started "collecting" those taxes. NY even has a line item on their income tax form to list the amout of purchases you made out of state, so you can pay sales taxes on them. Now that income tax deadline is here, more people are looking at that line item and pausing. "What do I have to list? Those pants I bought in NJ? That Dell computer, printer, camera?"

IF the states start comparing databases and start prosecuting for tax evasion, things could get very interesting. The "bargain" of mail order will be less so, except for the delayed payment of tax. AND you'd have to keep a record of it (and all other out f state purchases) for the NEXT April. While it's probably had little effect this first quarter, could it spell a significant downturn for Dell and others who don't have physical presence in each state? Or might it mean they will begin to open "Local" stores to sell their wares in person, as Gateway did. Many people still prefer a company that they can drive their laptop to and say, "It broke" instead of calling tech support and speaking with someone in another country who tells them the first step is to format their hard drive using the Dell recovery disk.

Name, email supplied

Intel comparing Apples with Bears

"Both machines ran using Halo's Time demo while iTunes was encoding MP3 songs."

Yeah Intel, cause as every true gamer knowz, we all play gamez while encoding tunez at the same time. NOT! I'd dare say 90+ percent of serious gamers minimize background tasks so as to optimize system performance, reduces crashes, memory leaks, etc to improve gaming performance. When I want to encode something, I let the system do it while I do my email, or more likely, fold laundry, wash dishes, make dinner, etc.

This benchmark is analogous to saying a Corvette has unacceptable acceleration compared to a toyota supra when towing a trailer.

If the only way Intel can show their stuff in a better light is in a scenario that only hardly anyone would engage in, they're in serious trouble. NOW, if they wanted to perform some more "real world" background tasks that ze gamerz might be partaking of while playing BF1942, they shoulda had several simultaneous downloads of 600MB mpeg pron files going on in the background. :)))))

Good morning from the states Mike ^_^

Gunter

The Miller's Tale

Mike,

First off, let me congratulate you on a site well done. It is a daily read for me and a great source of news and opinions, even if some of the opinions are way off base. Andrew Miller's for example.

While I commend Mr. Miller for his self-professed mastery of all things PHP and MySQL, his claims that his software is more secure than other third-party software are just that, self professed. I use phpNuke for my site. Yes, it has some limitations and there has been a couple of security holes in the software. I use phpNuke because, unlike Mr. Miller, my site does not pay my salary. Yes, it can be sluggish as well, but that is as much the fault of my free hosting as it the faullt of the software. Linuxjournal.com uses phpNuke and seems pretty responsive to me.

No, I am not a phpNuke zealot. I like the software but am not attached to it. I have hacked about the code using my less than expert level skills and haven't managed to break it yet. It is relativly easy to use and setup, but perhaps that is the problem. It gives the likes of me the opportunity to put up my own site that may or may not compete with Mr. Miller's (not that my site is anywhere near Spode's, it is a music and digital media news site).

No, I'll take phpNuke rather spending weeks gaining the knowledge to code my own CMS. I'd rather put that time to creating content for my site. It may be generic looking, but the content is what makes a site, not the look.

Joe McGuire
Webmaster and E-i-C,
tinfoil music

Graphics Cards and Bangs for the Buck

Hi Mike,

Just a random thought inspired by this story. Does anyone maintain a "bang for the buck/Euro" table for graphics cards, i.e. FutureMarks/$ to pick a single benchmark ? Of course I could spend a few hours trawling hardware web sites and calculating said table but being an idle bastard I was hoping someone else had beaten me to it.

From my own experience an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro on an Athlon XP 2500+/nForce Ultra 400 board pulled ~2500 FutureMark 2003s and the card cost $170 so ... pauses to dick about with calculator ... gives 14.7 FM/$. If the NV40 can come close to 12000 FutureMarks then for the same FM/$ it'd cost $800 (or there abouts) so I guess that it'll likely be a "better" buy as I have trouble imagining anyone splashing out $800 for a graphics card, other than spoiled hard core Nvidia/ATI fan boys with access to Mummy and Daddy's credit line of course.

Then again you'd probably have to figure in the cost of the PC you plug the card into too as I doubt you'd get maximum performance if you plugged the NV40 into an old Pentium Pro box as you'd be bottlenecked on CPU or sysem RAM and conversley dropping the 9600 into a state of the art Athlon 64 rig with oodles of super fast RAM won't alter the final score too much as the graphics card will now generally be the limiting factor.

This brings me back to the point (eventually). I wonder how the FM/$ for the FX5700 Ultra with GDDR3 would stack up to the FX5900 ? Might also be interesting to see if older cards based on end-of-life chipsets, say TNT2, would be competetive in a bang for the buck comparison even if they fall way behind in terms of features and absolute performance.

Roj

Intel's gone Nuts in May on Prescott Pricing

Hi there

So I'm looking at the new Prescott pricing and scratching my head. Yes everyone told me this was coming but seeing Prescotts at the 417 level I kind of had some hope Intel was pricing based on the realities of the world. Now I can clearly see they are not. Let's compare just the basics, assuming fairly comparable cost of all other things.

Intel AMD
cpu 640 733 (guess at FX-55 pricing)
memory (1gb) 600 (ddr2) 270
total 1240 903

Ok so if I'm willing to take a lesser performing part from Intel, with lesser performing memory, and I'm willing to pay 33% more, then I'm very smart to go with Intel. If we add up the differences to give us a % representation of the per $ performance, let's take a rough stab that the FX-55 will outperform the Prescott 3.6 by 16%. The cost difference is 37%, so basically the premium for Intel name is 53% adding that together. If someone wants to argue the math of that - whatever, but basically I'm seeing a 50% premium for equivalent performance to have Intel inside my machine.

Um Intel? If one of your suppliers told you that their parts were worth a 50% price premium over their competitors but actually performed worse, what exactly would you tell them? You would laugh them out of the meeting. I think you can guess what I'm doing right about now.

Good luck in Q2-4.

Best regards
Dave Fey

LEDs, fans and Antec's antics

Hello,

A little input of mine on the LED / FAN subject:

ARE US PATENTS COMPLETELY NUTS????? Make a hole, add a LED, and "voilà", a new invention????? Something is completely rotten in Edison Patent land.

I want to patent my LED-motorcycle, my LED-blender, my LED-fridge, my LED-TV, my LED-spoon, my LED-bed (with flashing thrill patterns), my LED-Grandmother (with nose-LED piercings!), my LED-dog, my LED-Toilet (awesome water spining effect)...

Congrats to all off you at the Inquirer. Great people, great news, great fun.

Gabriel

Model Numbers from Intel - they are Good

Hi there!

I'd tell you how froody I find the Inquirer to be, but that would really be stating the obvious and I'm trying to give that up.

So,

I find Intel's move to model numbers to be an overall positive one.

Sure there will be some confusion at first. That will hopefully decrease with time and approach 0 as time elapsed approaches infinity.

Well, actually I expect more than a few bumps on the graph, of marketing origins.

But anyway, I really think there will be, on the whole, less confusion with model numbers than we have today. The most common PC ads I see around here (here == Jordan), you see, usually sell things like "Intel 2400 MHz", "Pentium 4 2400 full cash" (they mean "cache" by "cash", btw) & "Intel 2400 full cash". It gets more than a little confusing to the uninitiated.

The initiated, of course, have been buying AMD for a few years now and so really do not care... ;-)

Name, email supplied