Bill Gates up your trouser leg

Gates new vision is an awful lot like the old one

Dear Mike,

I couldn't agree more with your assertion that Mr Gates is barking up the wrong seamless trouser leg when he thinks that his new vision of everything in my house (including the kitchen sink?) being controlled by him is a winner!!

If he imagines that I want to sit in my front room and listen to the music that my 15 year old son Michael thinks is leading edge, (bleeding awful, more like it), because Mr Gates' Windows Entertainment Centre has control of my TV and HiFi, then he can think again. Equally, I am sure that my son would not like to watch "Channel 4 News at Seven" just because I have the Remote Control! Michael's sole idea of the Noos is to read The Inquirer for its irreverent (or is that irrelevant?) comments.

I seem to remember ICL (where are they now?) trying to convince us in the 1980s [1990s, Ed. It sold two or three] that a PC combined with a TV was what we all wanted in our living room. Current follies are TV's that have a VCR and DVD player built into them - what do their owners think they will do when one component in their brave new Infotainment System fails, which if the Vole has anything to do with it is a foregone conclusion, or if the BSOD appears just as Hibernian (a superb Edinburgh football team to the uninitiated) are about to score the winning goal against Real Madrid in the European Cup Final. I imagine they will calmly ask The Wife to "Press the jolly old Reset Button (again), will you dear?"

The words "flying" and "pigs" come to mind at the very thought of Mr Gates being able to deliver anything which works as reliably as my present TV and HiFi, both of which have never performed an unexplained illegal act in all the years I have owned them.

Think again Mr Gates and concentrate on making your bug-ridden and unreliable software work on PC's before you attempt to destroy my other sources of leisure time.

Yours
Peter Andrews

Flying High

Who gives a flying f**k about TPC results when the "powerd by HP" logo flying high above the Disney Online site http://disney.go.com/destinations/flash/index.html can't even serve up a web page. I am trying to plan a family vacation to Disney World Florida and 9 out of 10 times when I click "Walt Disney World Resort in Florida" I get "This site is temporarily too busy to process your request. Please try again later." It seems that HP isn't only pissing off employees but potential visitors to Disney as well.

Regards
Name supplied

Apple Converstion Rates - they're all at it

Hi

Apple really do seem unable to convert $'s to £'s or €'s correctly. For example, I'm saving my hard earned to buy Logic Audio Platinum (which is basically owned by Apple) a snip at £527.99, the cheapest I can find it online. In the US I could pick it up online for $699.99 = £388.88, which is the best part of £140 cheaper! Overall, including hardware and software (PowerBook 12" 1ghz Combo, extra 512mb ram, external 200gb firewire hd, 4 port USB hub, Native Instruments Kontakt, Bitshift Audio PhatmatikPro, Logic Audio Platinum) it's costing me £2600 to set up a basic music studio, but if I lived in the US I could build the same studio for $3200, which after conversion equals a difference of ~£800. Hardly seems fair does it, and it's not just Apple.

You can take any piece of new computer hardware and find a similar situation. Graphics cards tend to be a good example, along with cpu's. Take a look at the prices on www.pricewatch.com (examples below) then compare those prices to UK online vendors (e.g. those listed on www.pricewatch.co.uk) but make sure you're sitting down first!

Actual converted prices in brackets
UK Prices include VAT

US Pricewatch
Athlon 64 3200 - $270 (£150)
Radeon 9800 XT - $433 (£240)
Plextor PX708A DVD burner - $177 (£98)

UK Pricewatch
Athlon 64 3200 - £214 ($385)
Radeon 9800 XT - £329 ($592)
Plextor PX708A DVD burner - £158 ($284)

As you can see they're all at it! Of course the argument you'd get is the US market is bigger than the British market, but these prices are the same across Europe. So the whole European market is really that much smaller than the US? Surely a strong £/€ gives us on this side of the pond greater spending power..? And it's not just us consumers who bear the brunt of this. How much better off would our businesses/schools/hospitals etc be with a level paying field?

Best regards
Andy Davis

IBM, Linux and Dog Food

Maybe IBM could start their desktop Linux push with those workers who go out into the field touting Linux. Currently even they don't eat their own dogfood.

I recently attended a technology forum hosted by MDC, the people that manage Malaysia's Multimedia Supercorridor, here.

An employee of IBM made a presentation on IBM's Commitment to Linux, including a slide (slide 21) entitled 'A Commitment to Linux across the entire Business'.

Unlike the other 3 speakers, who each presented using open source apps on an open source OS, she used Windows XP and Microsoft Powerpoint to make the presentation, and didn't even bother to maximize Powerpoint, so the audience was 'treated' to looking at a Microsoft XP taskbar throughout the entire presentation. If I was an IBM employee, I would have died of embarrassment.

(Name and address supplied, if you choose to print my mail, please)

Apple Conversion Rates - Australia

Europe isn't the only place to feel the effects of Apple's curious exchange rates...down here in Oz, an iPod lists for A$449.00. On current exchange rates, that's equivalent to US$343.00. I can't cost THAT much to ship here, can it?

Or maybe this is another example of a phenomena I've started to call 'Apple Mathematics', where small numbers are actually big (like desktop and server performance figures) and big numbers are really small (exhange rates). The truth is not in them, selah.

Apple Computers = doubleplusungood.

Mike Bailey

Apple and Opterons

Post this is ya wish (edited or not).

Apple claims 50% faster then opteron 2.0 GHz at HP Linpack. Many are claiming this is ridiculous (notably amdzone.com). If you look at top500.org specifically: http://www.top500.org/list/2003/11/

And take Rmax/processors you get: G5 = 10280/2200 = 4.67 GFlops per CPU Opteron = 8051/2816 = 2.859 GFlops per CPU

4.67/2.86 = 1.63 or 63% faster.

Granted HP Linpak on these large systems is measuring more than cpu speed, but still Apple's number is in the right ballpark.

I warn however that this does not mean that the G5 is faster at any given normal application (besides HP Linpack) nor even any Supercomputing application, just that the specific HP Linpack runs rather well on G5, which maybe in no small part to careful tuning on apple's part.

Cream and HP
You cite from the wrong web site. You should cite from http://www.tpc.org/. And you should check the full disclosure stuff. Actually, the Executive Summary is enough.

http://www.tpc.org/results/individual_results/HP/HP%20Integrity%20rx5670%20Cluster%2064P_ES.pdf http://www.tpc.org/results/individual_results/IBM/IBMp690es_101703.pdf

If you read the Executive Summary, it should be quite clear that none of the contestants have used anything a customer would use. Both HP and IBM are using over 2000 disk drives.

Such a benchmark would be a lot more interesting if the number of disks were limited to (say) less than 10. Excluding system disks. How many tpmC would we get? What would be $/tpmC?

Since the benchmark is totally bogus, the headlines regarding TPC-C benchmarks should really be "More Meaningless Numbers From ".

greetings

Spieling

re: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13484

"ONCE AGAIN the complaisant Brits are feeling their wallets creak, ..." [emphasis mine].

Complaisant? Is that some sort of hybridisation of compliant and complacent?

I'd expect this sort of ignorance from usenet, not a purportedly professional publication; electronic or otherwise.

Buy a speel checker all ready.

Paul

Apple and Prising

I grew up in the UK but visited the US since I was a child. In electronics and many other things it's always been 1 dollar = 1 pound. It's nothing new or specific to Apple, but I agree it's frustrating. The new thing is that with internet access people now know that they are getting ripped off.

There's another way to see it though. In the US you can make double the salary you get in Europe and pay less tax. The tax is important. Sales tax in Indiana is 5 %, in the UK over 17 % last time I checked and in Sweden 25 %. You could say why is the government taking all the tax. What do they do with it? How do other countried survive with much less tax? If you take the VAT off the price in the UK the price differential is a lot less but doesn't explain the whole disparity.

It's the same with internet access. I wrote and mentioned that too. Many countries get orgasmic at the thought of 2MBit / sec where Sweden has had that and 10 MBit / sec for the last 2-3 years at 40 Euro a month and now has 26 MBit / sec in some places for the same price. One is happy with what one has in ones own microcosm but only until you see the guy next door with 10 x the performance.

Best regards
Chris

Mr Prescott, Bar Steward

Mike,

I saw this today on the site and on Ace's.

For Inq: 'Says the article: "This means that some software will not run, clock for clock, faster on the Prescott than on the Northwood P4".'

From Ace's "Improved Imul latency : Northwood/Willamette do their integer multiplications on the FPU, and the big latency is due routing the data between integer and FP datapaths. Prescott has a dedicated integer multiplier. (Thanks goes to Heikki Kultala)."

I suspect you may have seen some Intel benchmarks on Prescott versus the P4 Extreme Edition and other Northwood P4s already. If so, then you may have noticed that, at the same clock speed, the Prescott core shows a >10% improvement in FP performance based on Spec FP when compared to the normal P4 (Northwood) at the same clock speed.

So, that is good news.

Thanks for accepting the anonymous commentary.

Apples and Pairs

Dear Mike...

Here we go again.

Apple re-inventing performance with their marketing machines. Once again, the G5 processor.

The real victim is the G5 and what it can offer in areas other than performance.

While Apple and Zealots have been wondering in their own little reality, the real world blew right past them. (I don't feel sorry for those Zealots out there, as they're blinded or arrogant to the truth...Even if it hits them like a brick wall.)

I'll let you interpret the following ...

source : http://www.apple.com/xserve/performance.html (Scroll down to the bottom). OR Xserve G5 Technology Overview January 2004 ( Page 10, last paragraph, L301323A_XserveG5_TO.pdf )

Performance tests by Apple, January, 2004. Apple performed the NetBench and WebBench tests without the supervision or verification of eTesting Labs, which makes no representation or warranty of the results. eTesting Labs WebBench version 4.1 was used with the standard test suite STATIC_WB41.TST, with the threads variable set to 5 and with 28 client computers. For the WebBench test, Xserve G5 ran Apache 1.3; the IBM systems ran Apache 2.0.

Why don't they test the IBM setups with FreeBSD (stable)? This way, you can compare AMD/Intel vs Apple using BSDs.

Why did they choose Red Hat? Why did they "mix it up" by staying inconsistent? (for the IBM setups, they used both Windows Server and Red Hat Linux interchangeably.)

Source : http://a192.g.akamai.net/7/192/51/0c5b0d0ef0f03b/www.apple.com/server/pdfs/L301323A_XserveG5_TO.pdf

The setups...(page 7)

• Apple Xserve G5. Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5, 1GB PC3200 SDRAM, two 250GB Apple Drive Modules, dual Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X Server v10.3.2.
• Dell PowerEdge 1750. Dual 3.2GHz Xeon,1GB PC2100 SDRAM, three 36GB Ultra320 SCSI drives, dual Gigabit Ethernet, Red Hat Linux 9.0.
• IBM eServer x335. Dual 3.2GHz Xeon,1GB PC2100 SDRAM, two 36GB Ultra320 SCSI drives, dual Gigabit Ethernet, Red Hat Linux 9.0 (unless otherwise indicated).
• IBM eServer x325. Dual 2GHz Opteron,1GB PC2700 SDRAM, two 36GB Ultra320 SCSI drives, dual Gigabit Ethernet, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (AMD 64-bit version).

Last time I checked, Opterons were available above 2Ghz. I'm sure even Intel can get them for a nice price for their own benchmarks. I don't see why Apple can't get Opterons above 2Ghz. What? What was that? Because that wouldn't be on the same speed with the G5 setup, right? What about the Xeon?

Page 8...

A/G BLAST is a version of NCBI BLAST developed by Apple in collaboration with Genentech. Optimized for dual PowerPC G5 processors, the Velocity Engine, and the symmetric multiprocessing capabilities of Mac OS X, A/G BLAST makes a wide variety of searches available at higher speeds.

And what about AMD/Intel's optimisations? Is this how we make comparisons nowadays? Optimise your product, but leave competing products in an un-optimised state? (Wow, how unrealistic. This would be like comparing Xeons and Opterons with an application specifically optimised for Xeons...SSE2, HT, etc. And yet, in the real world, people do optimise their systems with maximum performance.)

Apple should focus on what it can offer, that x86 platforms can't. Or approach it from a different angle.

All one needs to do, is take a look at VIA's C3 and the Mini-ITX platform. Sure, they don't aim for performance, but they can get into market niches that AMD/Intel have little interest in. VIA have their own little market (no pun intended) and listen to their customer's requirements. (All you need to do is look into Industrial and embedded mobo manufacturers to see that the C3 is present in just about every one of them.)

The "G5 situation" is like the following...MS comparing Windows Server and Linux http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.asp

All I can say is...Hey! Big companies, stop lying. Customers are no longer dummies, we can interpret the information ourselves. We expect some PR machine working to some extent. But we don't like "over-exaggeration" to the point of being obvious as a signal flare in the dark, calm, cloudless night.

Regards
Please keep my email address private. Thanks

IT rags play into Apple's hands

This is how you IT rags play in to Apple's hand's... Apple knows its lying, its fans know its lying, all you are doing is helping these lies reach further, faster, and the press then builds around these lies.

And as Apple and Republicans know, there is no such thing as bad press, especially when it's based on lies.

Name supplied

GPL not viral in any way

People in the GPL community have been trying real hard lately to make people understand that GPL is not viral in any way, especially the way you described it. If in fact Kiss Technology has used MPlayer code in their product in violation of GPL they now have three options which are legaly equal to one another in the sense that neither is the prefered way in the eyes of the law. Options are:

1) Stop using GPL code in their product
2) GPL all of the code in their product (community would love this one)
3) Make MPlayer code they are now using, and all modifications to that code, available for download under the terms of the original MPlayer license, and the rest of their proprietary code can stay under whatever licence they choose.

It is completely up to them to decide which of these options they will enforce. Linking proprietary and GPL software (if done in the right way) does not obligate anyone to GPL their proprieatary code. That is why LGPL was invented. About MPlayer website making available proprietary codecs for download, well that too is a legal issue and companies involved (Microsoft, Real, Apple) should protect their property the way they see fit. Laws should always be enforced not only when it suits us.

Milos
Serbia

Winders Everywhere

Hi Mike,

Existing Windows XP still has 16-bit limits under the hood (not to mention 16-bit code left in for compatibility) so it is not fully 32-bit operating system as many may think.

What are the chances then for 64-bit Windows to be fully 64-bit so as to exploit full power of 64-bit marchitecture?

Keep in mind that Microsoft will not eliminate 32-bit or even 16-bit support from it because that would mean shrinking its user base which is already thoroughly shaken by Linux.

So with all that 16/32/64-bit mix'n'match code what are the chances that it will run more efficient and have less bugs than before?

AMD is selling a CPU that will be plagued by the issue that many people still fail to recognize. Only real way to use full 64-bit potential is to drop support for legacy software and hardware including existing BIOS-es.

Pozdrav
Igor Levicki

Peltiers Again

Inquirer staff/The Letterman,

Not sure if I sent this email to the right address (haven't done it before). Please omit this paragraph and my name/email address if you choose to publish this. Thank you.

Re: Pentium 4 overheat probs....The dud the 'Peltier Process' is

The Peltier Process is fine for small devices with low heat emmissions or that need to be kept cool, but NOT for microprocessors/CPU's. Remember, the Peltier Process only transfers heat from one place to another. It does NOT remove that heat from existence (still need those big or noisy fans, or one VERY large case). Also the Peltier process is not very "efficient" thermally (see http://www.peltier-info.com/info.html). If AMD's Athlon 64 3200+ is rated at 89W of thermal dissipation and the upcoming Intel Prescott at 94W, 103W, 150W+?, how can a principle applied to picnic coolers work on PC's? Also remember there IS a differnece between heat temperature (in degrees C) and total quantity of heat (e.g. Watts) If a thing so seemingly 'magical' existed, don't you think a 250W+ Prescott would be sitting on your desktop?

Just my two cents,

Reroy, Kiss this

Rick,

Kiss does not have to distribute a CD with every box it sells. It only has to make the code available to the people it distributed the binaries to. By available if a user requests the binaries they are even entitled to charge the cost of shipping and a CDRW. Even if the guys from MPlayer wanted the code Kiss could hold them to first buying a box using hte binary. If this request was made and Kiss failed to comply, only THEN would it be in violation of GPL. My company is uaing all kinds of GPL'd products to which we have no source code simply becasue we never requested it. You would think an MS bashing GPL supporting site like the INQ would know this.

Name supplied

Microsoft lawyers come down hard on Mikerosoft man

i rekun this is gr8 i alwAs spull mikerosoft rong now i no ow it shud be spelled

Or , failing that, there is a saying here in the UK which is used to put down children when they get a little antse. To whit, 'It's not big and it's not clever'.

Well, when employing lawyers in Canada (where they tend to speak and spell in English English with only a couple of notable exceptions) this must not hold true. At least not for MICROSOFT. MICROSOFT top brass must have had a personal and private giggle at employing a law firm calling itself 'SMART & BIGGAR'.

All I can say to MICROSOFT (You have to love those caps) is that their pet sharks are, as they say themselves, 'Yours very truly'.

May I humbly suggest that, having studied the 419/phishing type layout and punctuation, Mike check first that he is not subject to a very personal phishing scam or even the opening salvo of a full on 419 approach.

Even the illiterate teens that seem to proliferate at an alarming rate in these modern times couldn't manage to mis-spell MICROSOFT so badly as to get mikerosoft.

How insecure could the worlds largest software company really be? Are they even aware of this approach? Do they wear fresh underwear every day, just like their grandma's told them to? Do they truly think that this is big and clever? Are they going to shut down every site in the world owned by a guy called Mike? Does the venerable Mack himself feel fear and trepidation now? Should I stop asking stupid questions now?

OK then

Thanks for hearing out my rant

Yours honestly and truly and forever and ever until the rainbows in the sky are all red

Ian Naylor

Coffee spluttered out of my Nodes

I laughed so hard reading the lawyers letter that coffee came out my nose!

Please be advised that your use and registration of the domain name MIKEROSOFT.CA as aforesaid is clearly confusing with our clients' registered trade-mark and trade-name MICROSOFT, as well as their domain names MICROSOFT.COM and MICROSOFT.CA.

I wish I'd come up with the domain name and registered it!

If Microsoft's clients are so stupid that they think a domain name called www.mikerosoft.ca, which contains a disclaimer that it is NOT microsoft, is ACTUALLY microsoft, or associated with Microsoft, then Microsoft has the dumbest clients in the world. (OH - wait - that's me! And I'm not dumb).

Man, I wish Microsoft would take me to court on the same platform - New Zealand courts would dismiss it in about 30 mikeroseconds! ;)

Kind regards

Chris Davies