64-bit desktops have been around forever

The 64-bitness of AMD and Apple
This is ridiculous. The 64-bit desktop PC has been around for quite a time, but anti-Unix prejudice seems to keep people from admitting the fact. In what sense are both AMD Athlon 64 and Apple G5 systems desktop PCs, and SunBlade 150s not?

You MIGHT just get away with claiming that the products from SGI, IBM, HP and Compaq were not "mainstream", but it is stretching credulity to claim that Apple systems are mainstream and Sun SPARC ones are not. No, I don't know what the first 64-bit desktop PC was, but it could have been an Alpha.

Yes, there is now a 64-bit "IBM PC" (i.e. x86-based system), which there wasn't before, but it is nonsense to claim that it is the first 64-bit desktop PC. You will be claiming that the BBC Micro wasn't a PC next - if so, what was it?

And note that, if you look up the original IBM announcements, you will find that the term "PC" for "Personal Computer" was widely used for any computer used as a single-user desktop system, which is why IBM trademarked the term "IBM PC" and insisted that that term was used in all their marketing blurb.

Regards,
Nick Maclaren

Hack attack
Good day Mike,

I am writing this to let you know that my computer has been under attack since last Friday September 26th. Friday during the day I found that someone had broken into my computer while I was online. In fact I was on the computer at the same time that they were although I didn't originally realize it. My computer was spontaneously rebooting at random intervals and since my background is in hardware I assumed it was a problem with one of the components. I proceeded to run some diagnostic checks but was never able to complete them because the computer was rebooting before I could get them completed. What was actually going on was that the person that broke in had managed to give themselves admin rights and they were denying me the ability to check things.

Without belaboring the story much more they were able to compromise my router (an inexpensive closeout, but hey it was for a home setup). Still yet it was admittedly my mistake for using inexpensive equipment. Once inside the intranet they were able to compromise my computer because the firewall settings are much less restrictrive than they are for the internet.

Friday night I began getting a large number of hits on my firewall from one machine, in fact I took over a thousand hits that night. Most of which were being listed as not being harmful but were still eating bandwidth to deal with them. I filed an abuse report with the ISP and sent a notification to my own ISP that I had done so. There were a few that were serious such as an attempt to install a doly trojan which my firewall rejected. I had disconnected my router during the incident earlier in the day so they no longer had that route available to enter the computer.

Saturday during the day things were much quieter. I assume the ISP that I had filed the abuse report with had taken the computer offline that had been hitting my firewall so much the night before. Around six in the evening I got a traceroute hit from a computer that to my knowledge had no reason to run one. Then about seven P.M. I started receiving hits from another computer from a different ISP using a file sharing program. These continued through out the night until I was being hit with a request every two seconds from the same computer. The hits were obviously bogus because I do not nor have I ever had any file sharing software on my computer. No one has any reason to have me in their file sharing database or in whatever search engine they use. Again I filed an abuse report and notified my ISP as to what was happening.

Sunday things were relatively quiet again during both the day and that night.

Monday things were quiet again so I thought that maybe the attacks had stopped. But no, Monday night they started up again. This time with a variation in method. Since last night I have been receiving file sharing hits from multiple computers and ISP's all over the world. Some 2500 hits at the last count I made. Way too many to file any abuse reports against although I did once again notify my ISP of what was happening. I had noticed one other odd thing going on. I kept getting hits from a server in California to port zero which is normally an ISP hit. On further investigation I found that the individual that broke in had changed the mac address on my built in lan chip and had registered it with a server in Califonia. So everytime I went on line my computer was broadcasting the address and the server thinking that I was supposed to be using it was attempting to connect to my computer. My guess is that this was a measure by the attacker to be able to determine when I came online so that he/she could resume the attack.

At this point I wasn't sure how they had changed the address or what else they may have done so I made the decision to reformat my drive and reinstall my OS and software in the hopes that I could shake my attacker. It was however to no avail. As soon as I reconnected to the internet I was immediately hit with 169 hits on the firewall and they continue even as I write this. My best guess is that the end result is meant to be to swamp my computer with hits and force me offline.

What are the reasons for the attack on me? The only crime that I can think of that I have committed was to recently install spam filtering software. I bounced an e-mail spam back to one individual and he/she immediately returned with more that had been modified to put my e-mail address in the return path so that I could no longer bounce them. I then put the individual on a blacklist with an auto delete. It was not long after that that the attacks began. I have no hard proof because if I did I would be taking much stronger actions than I am pesently, but I strongly suspect it is the reason for the attacks.

The following is an open statement to the attacker or attackers as the case may be. This is in no way intended to elicit sympathy from anyone but to simply state the facts as they are.

You should be very proud of yourself. You are about to drive a cripple, whose major outlet to the outside world is the internet, off the net because I didn't want to look at your unsolicited, unwanted ads.

I know that many spammers believe that they are engaging in free speech when they send out ads. But that actually isn't quite right because it is commercial speech rather than free speech. You are attempting to sell a product and make money with what you are doing. Commercial speech has lesser rights than free speech but rights none-the-less.

I am a strong supporter of free speech. Even more so for those with whom I disagree. However, your rights to commercial speech do not overide my right to object to what you are advertising and to choose not to view your ads. Just as every individual is free to get up during a commercial on televison and go to the bathroom or get something to eat rather than view the ads being presented, every individual has the right to not view ads in any form that they object to or are not interested in. If you like Ford automobiles and drive one, General Motors is not entitled to force you to watch ads for their automobiles because they want to sell you one of theirs. Both free speech and commercial speech are about persuasion not coercion. What some of you spammers out there are engaged in is attempted coercion as evidenced by your actions such as the attack on me for refusing to view your ads.

I will tell you that you will never force me to accept your ads regardless of whatever coercive measures you employ, even if you end up driving me off the internet.

The only thing that I hope that will come of this is that others will stand up to you also. You may bloody me but I will never kneel.

To everyone else please fix your computers so that they can't be taken over by people that would use them as this individual is doing and please don't purchase products from spammers. By doing so you only feed the problem, rather than doing someting to help solve it.

Thanks to everyone who took time to read this, I hope by relating my experience that I was able to impart some knowledge that is useful for you.

Pat Mitchell

Intel's Extra Energy Pentium 4
"In the meantime, the chipmaker will suffer the embarrassment of delivering a new chip that may be demonstrably slower than one it already has on the market"

Remember the Pentium 4? How at 1.4 GHz it was barely on a par with a 1 GHz PIII? This is nothing new for Intel, but rest assured they'll spin it up.

Name supplied

Macintosh Addiction
Dear mike

It has been brought to my knowledge that most "Mac Addicts" are the most ignorant people when it comes to talking about hardware, they will always say that thier mac is better than your pc, or like in the case of your article saying that the PC running AMD Athlon 64 and operton processors aren't the first true 64 bit complete machines. He pointed out that you can't call a Mac a "PC" that is a disgrace, I guess that he doesn't realize what the acronym PC stands for, it stands for Personal Computer does it not?

At least that is what I was always told. Any why how can you call a Mac the best computer, definitely not by price point; because you can get a PC that is faster than any Mac out there for far cheaper than you can buy a high-end Mac, or if they are slower not noticablely enough for me to pay that kind of money for a computer that pretty much just looks pretty.

I don't have any further venting that I need to get out right now, just wanted to let that Mac user hear some of my thoughts on Mac-in-craps.

sincerely
Kris Yochum

Pentium V-ness
Hi Paul [Dutton],

I'm STILL waiting for the air-cooled P*ss 4 @ 4.6 Gig. that Intel promised two years ago... And now I read that the P*ss V will run at 5-7 Gig. Why do I not believe this??? Let me count the ways... :>))

Hell, Intel can't get a 3.4 Gig. P4/Prescott to run at less than a 100W on 90 nano. Do they really believe they can get to 5 Gig. on 65 nano with a P*ss V at ANY time in 2004, even for engineering samples??? They need to add a couple years on to their development/release roadmaps.

What's REALLY funny is to see Intel become the *discount leader* after years of trashing AMD. Now with no competitive products in ANY segment of the PC market, and none likely to appear any time soon, Intel is having even bigger fire sales than in the past. It was interesting to see Intel even provided Babes and a 30% promo co-op ad money for Computex displays that did NOT have AMD products from mfgs. of both.

With a $600 Million IRS bill that's growing, and cash incentives by the boat loads, and ASP's dropping like hot rocks, only a fool could believe Intel isn't suffering from a major Hammer attack to their heads and bank accounts. The ultimate affirmation of Intel's engineering and marketing issues lies in the P*ss 4 "EE" edition. Surly "EE" is an internal Intel acronym for "Enema Edition" with all the puckered azzes in Satan Clara after AMD delivered a devastating kick to Intel's gonads with the A64 series only a few months after killing Xeon and Itanium sales with the Opteron. And with AMD already having 64-bit laptop A64 series chippies, the puckering just gets worse in Satan Clara.

It's good to see Intel humbled by superior technology and execution. Maybe they'll get off their high horse and deliver competitive products at competitive prices for a change. Their industry dictatorship is gone and they better adjust to it. Yes, they still own the largest share of the PC industry but they are loosing market share daily and in (5) years they will be lucky if they still have the majority of the PC market.

The times, they are a changin'.

Randy Hubbard

Sweeteners for Intel's little friends
Mike,

Such "incentives" are alive and well and have been for a quite some time. I have been a systems administrator for a computational biology/bioinformatics lab in a major US "Ivy League college" (see From:) and I've been in technology meetings where any mention of AMD makes Intel/HP staff *very* nervous and results in comments such as "but they're not a real chip company" and other such nonsense. The crux of it came to be that Intel would beat any price that any AMD vendor could provide - and this goes as far back as last summer (2002) when HP was touting their Apollo chipset Itanium2.

A couple of months back we bench tested a white-box quad Itanium2 (1.3GHz, then 1.5GHz) from Intel which was a nightmare. Not only would most of our software not compile on the beast (and we have some pretty smart people around), but when it did run it either seg faulted or gave little improvement over the Xeon systems we have in the >2GHz range. The computer scientists we collaborate with love the EPIC idea and some of the concepts raised in Itanium2, but from a practical viewpoint, it's hopeless. They might as well give it away (which is another thing we've been told they'd do....)

A large number of our computers (desktops and servers) are Athlon based and we are currently looking to invest in some Opteron machines (e325 from IBM, and desktops from random sources) because our work is the kind that would benefit from a large pool of memory - loading the complete genome sequence into memory in one go to run BLAST and other analysis tools is quite an attraction (although our SGI Origins do it in a heartbeat!), as is our existing code running better than existing machines without a recompile. From our tests on Opteron on another site, this generally works out very well for less than half the cost of an Itanium2 system.

While I don't think there is anything new in here, if you do publish any thoughts herein, I'd appreciate it if you didn't publish my name and email address as that could raise the "Conflict of Interest" contract with my employer....

Name supplied

The Microsoft Media Center debate
Is Microsoft Media Center any good at all?

Whoop de do da.

For about 400 dollars I can go buy a used 400mhz system slap in an All In Wonder ATI card and have a system that does all of this and more. I'm writing this email on a system that's been doing that very thing for about four years now.

Personally I'm surprised ATI doesn't pitch a fit because they are referring to it as MMC because that's what ATI's program is called mmc.exe which stands for Multi Media Center not Microsoft Media Center.

Want eye candy ATI's MMC supports skins and currently ships with four different ones. How's this for eye candy, surfing the web in overlay mode and still being able to read this article while watching the news. Nvidia ought not to be to proud they'll probably loose the contract for this like they did with the Xbox.

Over priced and over hyped with DRM, only an idiot would buy it.

Jason