What to do about new technology in 2004?

Hiya Mike,

first off, hands down to a great news website, cant get enough of it!

i've been reading up on all this new technology comin out this year (BTX, PCI Express, NV40/R420, DDR2, prescott/AMD64 etc) and been havin some thoughts about them, in terms of upgrading.

Everyone talks about how they will help PCs be faster cooler etc in the long run, but no-one really seems to say what the initial benefits will be for an upgrader. Now since i'm a relative newbie in the hardware sector, built my 1st PC now over 2 years ago (wow doesnt seem that long ago!) which is still a great machine considering i jumped in with almost no idea what i ws doing! (incase ur wondering i bought a Celeron1.8, intel D845HV MoBo, 896Mb SDRam, GeForce MX440 which can still handle non DX9 games quite well in my opinion)

Basically, i like my games. Most people do. I'm looking forward to the (eventual!) releases of HL2 and Doom3 but put simply i know my PC aint got a chance in hell of running these games any good (cmon i tried the D3 alpha when it was first leaked and it managed an impressive 12FPS when not doing anything, and about 3FPS when i tried doin somethin!)

Now since i know i've gotta get a new PC to play them, what would be an advisable thing to do? i wont get either of the games on initial release cause i know i'll get distraced from revising forUni exams (not good hehe) so i will probably delay building till atleast the summer and all these technologies are out.

BUT the big question is, will it be worth buying this hardware, from a non-entheusiast's point of view once its out? i've seen almost nothing in terms dates, or even images of new products from anyone apart from intel, and even they seem a little flaky on the details, which seems a bit odd considering Intel wants all this released and available by april! maybe someone knows of any articles that has something on this...

I've seen reports that say the industry isnt too entheusiastic about adopting Intel's new board configurations, but personally i think it will do so when it sees how well they all perform together in an Intel machine with it all in, if they havent already started doing so, but i havent seen it reported yet.

Now the point of this e-mail is should i buy the ATX/AGP/DDR hardware, knowing that these product are soon to be phased out, or buy the newer stuff, which is gonna be more expensive, but i can upgrade later on?

Maybe you can send me some links that help me on these issues, as i'm really unsure as to what to do!! also i really dont want to buy an AMD64 right now, since to me at the moment it seems rather pointless getting one as it doesnt seem to be a 100% complete project, and there is no XP compatable with it, or any software that takes advantage of the 64bitness! (OK there IS linux but that really doesnt interest me right now, since it wont run games and other programs i use frequently) the most likely time i will go 64bit is when Longhorn is out, which aint for a while yet!

So, what do you recommend?

Thanks for reading! Adam Farden

There's no choice but Microsoft software

Hi Mike,

I have just read the review of MyIE and Opera, and I feel it misses the point. *All* non IE alternatives are crippled by the W3C standards. I cannot believe there are commercial companies out there who haven't woken up to this fact. It seemed painfully obvious that this battle was over back in '96 when Netscape lost, but no, people are still making products that are compatible with a rubbish standard.

So here it is: IE's document object model is easier for web monkeys to get their heads round than the beardy W3C standard. Therefore most pages use it, rather than go thru the pain of trying to work out how to conform to the standard. And what do the competition focus on? Skins. Last desperate attempt to ship a product to those too stupid to see it doesn't do what they want. I don't want to navigate using the mouse in exciting ways if I cannot actually read the pages properly when I get there!

What annoys me is this: Compaq wouldn't have got off the ground if they were nearly compatible with IBM. AMD wouldn't be able to compete against Intel if they only supported half the instructions (and put a new slant on "Add"). And its this pig ignorant, fanatical devotion to a long dead set of writings that has got us to where we are today. I cannot run anything other than MS products for this reason.

Grrh

Alex Powell

The right royal roasting of Intel

Hi there

I'm kind of surprised you haven't roasted Intel yet, but maybe that's a tomorrow article. Only weeks ago we were told "we do 64bit too" and that it was enabled on the Prescott core, IMPLYING that we might be able to see it on the desktop. They certainly did nothing to dispel that thinking. Now we find that instead of April to May its moving towards late Q2 maybe even Q3 by the time we get there for that server chip. I totally suspicious in all this. I've long used Intel chips because, contrary to many enthusiasts, I value both overclockability and super stability at the same time. You call a software company with a problem and you say you have an Intel chipset and you don't get the "have you checked your machine first" stuff nearly so much. Tell them you have AMD and they ask if you have the latest chipset drivers.

Anyway I'll get on to the point here. They made a lot of allusions to the ideas that in a few months time we might see some spectacular stuff from Prescott, that a new chipset would get us where we wanted to be and current, and that sometime towards the later part of the year we "might" be able to enable 64bitness, when there was a good OS to go with it. NOW they talk only 64 bit on some server chips, they can't get Prescott to run at Northwood speeds much less better, and we are told that the top end chipset with all the super wow features, may not show up till June, require a new graphics card and memory that might end up being 2-3 times the price and perform worse than what we have now. I call this a serious backpedal after the show. I honestly suspect that they can't turn on the 64 bit parts of Prescott because it will incinerate itself (TOTAL suspicion on my part). And they made that entire show hoping we would wait till later in the year when they had a better competitive position. I would go further to suspect they aren't going to enable 64bit on the desktop till Tejas if they even do it then. I see them making a long list of promised products and I see them all coming next year not this year. Meanwhile myself, and a great many others are ready to upgrade our machines now, not later, not even in the latter half of the year.

To contrast, despite the stability issues, AMD offers or will (crum even they are late with the FX-53) offer dual channel 64 bitness that will use the same socket that I can then just buy a new mother board and graphics card later for when PCI-E is ready for AMD. Its a more progressive step where the core product the CPU has longer durability over time. If I go Intel, I have to buy a load of very expensive parts and then replace the rather expensive CPU later. DDR2 should be available at 800FSB rates to start, not 533, and we shouldn't have to pay a premium for something that is basically the same or easier to build. We are basically being asked to cover everyones' investments here and that might be normal but I think its taking us to the cleaners. The net result of all of this is going to be that the nice "refresh" in the microelectronics industry that we might have seen from people buying new products is going to become muddied, and I bet it ends up not happening. People will be confused, most will choose not to buy when confused, and the whole industry suffers. Its happened before, only this time they are doing it to themselves. Intel, AMD and partners better get the act together here. I'm drawing a lot of parallels to Nvidia here with Intel. They have a chip that can't compete, and so they throw up snow. Instead of telling us the real when and where and what we have to choose from they leave that "mystery until later" cloud out there. That stunts the industry and the analysts drop tech stocks. That kills the innovation and capital for new investment. Its bad from a whole picture point of view and personally I think you should make a long list of Intel promises or "implications" and show exactly what they are doing to carry through on them. I bet its a very dirty laundry list. AMD isn't clean so I'm not at all trying to say that.

This is just pathetic that Intel claims such lofty abilities then falls so badly on their own face. 64 bit should be "possible" on performance desktops at a reasonable price now. Thank you AMD. Solid sturdy chipsets, SATA, and PCI-E should be here and running solid. Where are you Intel? And the two of these should be available now, not at year end, for us to purchase and use. Why is it so hard to teach industry leaders to lead and not make smoke screens?

Sorry I'm kind of furious with Intel at the moment.

Best regards,
Dave

Be Gentoo with me

Mike,

The genius who wrote to you, enthusing about the amazing performance of his Gentoo/XP box gave me the best stupid user laugh of the week. Leaving aside the towering brilliance of his plan to speed up windows by putting the swap file on a ramdisk*, the Gentoo rhetoric reminded me ineditably of this:

Here.

I'd be nice to have my name and address withheld if you do anything with this, to save me the foam-flecked wrath of gentoo weenies...

[*] Yes, I know, if it isn't actually swapping at all, you could argue that you won't get into an insane recursive downward spiral, and we all know that VM does than just paging... However, if your 'doze box isn't swapping at all, the speedup from moving the SWP file to another faster disk would be minimal. Kinda smacks of the famous fortune cookie "Virtual memory! Now I can have REALLY massive ramdisks!", only in reverse.

Be Gentoo with me, 2

Well, Mike, your correspondent 'R' may need reminding about Knoppix and Debian. Perhaps this is an ideal moment to remind us all. v3.3 will do just fine for the mo., although Klaus must be almost there with his kernel 2.6 version. [The c't release seems to have too many issues]. and it's all done, without taxing the little grey cells.

The CD is almost flawless, relatively, in an S/W kind-of way; the installed version is still a little querky on sound and Winmodems. Blwydd y dda Dewi Sant - sorry about the spelling/grammar. DGL.

Name supplied

Be Gentoo with me, 3

Hi Mike,

What a terrible experience 'R' must have had, and then his capslock key starts acting up as well. My own experience with SuSE however is the complete opposite, to the degree that work is now a 75/25 server split with SuSE and Windows NT4, 5 and whatever 2003 actually is, in favour of SuSE even to the point that our 'Average User' is looking forward with interest (prehaps not joy) to our switch from Exchange 5.5 to SLOX.

As for the desktop, thats still 90% windows, however we have a thin client system whereby the windows 2000 machines become SuSE 8.2 at the insert of a floppy or the selection at boot and over the next few months a further 200 machines will become pure linux desktops, that will be running suse 9.1 with KDE 3.2. The users of these systems will not be uber-l33t h4x0rs, but teachers, schoolchildren and members of the public. Our test runs show that with a couple of hours of show and tell they feel right at home, and then start to be amazed at the stability and the speed and xeyes.

As for SuSE's hardware support, I've installed SuSE 9 on just about every machine I've had to use, from a 450MHz P3 to a Dual Xeon with RAID 5 without a hitch, infact recalling the first time I installed Linux I can barely belive its the same OS. Of course winmodems are problimatic, and enabling 3D on GFX cards can be a learning experience but these issues are known about to anyone who pays the slightest attention.

As for SuSE USA tech support, being UK based I can't comment, but the UK's free support is exactly what you can expect from telephone support. They will help you with installation and only installation as it says on the box, once your booted thats it. If you have any more complex problems then SuSE's lists are full of people asking for and recieving help, all for free and in many cases from senior SuSE staff.

As for Linux 'simply NOT being Prime time yet' for the desktop. Well this is an oldie that many linux users will recognise, as allways it depends on the users, for us its suitable for eleven year olds. For others who think you can only access the internet by clicking on the blue 'e' and the only word processor is MS Word then there will be problems, but then again there will allways be problems with that type of user.

As the three dead trolls once observed, 'Every OS sucks' but in my opinion Linux, and especially SuSE suck a hell of a lot less.

Regards,

BenH

Be Gentoo with me, 4

A-FRIGGAN-MEN!

Look I would LOVE to use Linux instead of Windows, but I've installed it like 5 times now and each time I run into the same problem. Linux take ages to get everything working correctly, and god forbid you want to install anything on that OS. I mean what a total nightmare, setting up config files and what not in text based editors. I mean Linux seems ages away from the comparative embarrassingly simplistic.

Find the file named “install.exe/setup.exe” run it. Click “Next” until finished. Run program, without any additional setup.

I'm in IT and I would love to switch my company over to Linux, but I'd have to learn it first. From what I've seen there's only one type of Linux user that can successfully switch a company to Linux, and that's a guru. There's no way Linux beginner/intermediate, could do that with any assurance they wont run into an insurmountable compatibility problem. Hell, as far as I can tell there are no true Linux beginners actually. Just people who absolutely need to learn Linux, or guys that have no social life away from a keyboard.

I'm genuinely interested in learning Linux, and the cost-savings to my company in switching from windows/office based systems would be enormous. Leaning Linux however would have to be done in my free time though. I have a full time job, and I'm extremely busy at work. I come home from work, and I've got a girlfriend, friends, family, and personal responsibilities to contend with. After all that guess where learning the most user-unfriendly OS publicly available lands?

I recall a while ago Apple boasting about how small the manual was for the Mac was, and shortly after MS made 95 accompanied by an accordingly diminutive manual. Both companies touting “look at how little you need to read to operate our OS!” Linux appears to take the opposite approach, requiring users to read manual file, after manual file in order to complete even the most mundane tasks.

As a developer I also see the benefits, of open source software. With the ability to use tons of publicly available and highly optimized libraries, not to mention portability of our work it's a developer's god-send. Get it to work on one Linux system, and all you need to do is recompile it on any subsequent system, regardless of architecture! Heck, with a ubiquitous OS structure like that AMD64, and Itanic would have had a way better stab at things. Instead of waiting for the very specific monoplatform x86 MS Windows to get ported to their architectures, they could have been rocking-and-rolling right out of the gates, appealing to everyone.

Truth be told, it appears that the Linux community doesn't want the OS to be mainstream popular. Like the garage-band fans that get upset when their favorite band releases a 2nd album that goes double platinum. Now that they aren't the only ones listening to them they say condescendingly “they've gone commercial”. I hear a lot about Linux taking over the world, and that it belongs to every one… but it really only belongs to those of us with the time to waste learning it. And most in the open source community seem to like it that way.

Matt