We refute Intel's claims

Ummm...

Ever play an Insta-gib match with "Unreal Bots" on Unreal Tournament 2004?

If you did... ever realize thinking and decision making is much to slow and actually hampers your performance?

If you did... ever realize every single decision you make is on an instinctual level where even you can't even see until 2 seconds AFTER it happens?

My point?

Some games are too bloody fast to even consider predicting a player's movements. Unreal Tournament is such a game where you need to react instantaneously. There's no way you can predict a player's movements 2 seconds in advance from skin and sweat with Unreal Tournament: Cuz they're sweating all the time!

The Dude

DoJ says remedies have reduced Microsoft monopoly

Inquiring minds would like to know exactly what in the final judgments the DOJ believe actually made these changes? I was under the impression that MS has been busily ignoring end users and cow towing to the RIAA and MPAA.

Creating some rather amazingly bad products, bad for he end user anyway. Coercing/Encouraging their partners to corrupt and violate the ISO standards process. While a bunch of “unconstitutional, commie, virus license loving, FOSS fanatics” have been creating safer cleaner open source software that does what people need and want it to do.

Sounds like the tame Bushies at the DOJ need to stop dislocating their arms, pull there proverbial(s) out of their neither regions, and look outside for a change. That pasty complexion might give the false impression that they may know something about computers, economics and reality.

After all reality is what you make it. Just watch out for that first step, W. E. Coyote always seems to have problems with that one.

Funny I never thought of myself as overly paranoid, must be my diet, to much BS maybe?

Cheers!
Paul H (no relation)

Research firm claims AMD beats Intel on power efficiency

I take issue with Intel's response to my firm's latest power efficiency test results. Their comments are:

"The report doesn't measure our latest Xeons, or quad cores" The Intel 5160 is a Woodcrest dual core chip. It is proper to compare the 5160 to an AMD 2222 dual core. If Intel wants to see quad core test results they can loan me a pair of chips. I will run the test at no charge and publish test results within a week.

"We have 2GHz quad cores in the market at 50 watts, 12.5 per core!". 12.5 watts per core is not the whole story. We are measuring power at the wall including power for the northbridge, RAM, fans, etc. In the near future we will publish a power efficiency comparison of an Intel quad core server to an AMD quad core server.

"The report ignores performance, in that you'd use less Intel servers to get the same job done, meaning less electricity is needed." This statement is incorrect. First, my report has a section dedicated to comparing maximum throughput and power efficiency at maximum throughput. Second, the test data shows that for this type of complex transaction processing workload, at maximum throughput, the Xeon is up to 14 percent faster than the Opteron for calculation type tasks but it is up to 19 percent slower than the Opteron when disk I/O is the bottleneck. It is wrong to make a categorical assertion that fewer Xeons would be needed.

"We stand behind all of our energy efficient claims, period. For those IT managers who don't do their own in-house testing, we recommend that each look at the 100s of independently verified benchmarks and reviews that exist for the most credible assessment."

I feel that Intel is trying to avoid the issue. Virtually all of those benchmarks were single user, desktop, and calculation intensive tests. Most of them did not even report power efficiency. The issue at hand is power efficiency for a client/server workload. I would be very interested in seeing some test results from Intel that report power at the wall for a transaction processing workload. Anandtech ran a power efficiency test. I believe that their findings agree with mine. http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3039

Neal Nelson

Entire city of Vista users can't access the internet

"Lundis Energi blamed Microsoft because Vista has got a bug and it isn't going to change the configuration of the server just to cope with the flaw." Now that's what I call arrogance! Shutting down a whole city just because you don't want to modify the configuration of a server. I used to work at this place where we had a internal site. The guy wrote it and tested it under Linux. The site looked horrible in IE and it was almost unusable, but he refused to fix it because he claimed the site rendered that way because of an IE bug and that's not his problem. He was probably expecting, like these guys from your article, everybody to switch to Linux just so we access his lousy site...

Name supplied

Hi folks,

I tried reading the swedish article, but found no online translator to make that task simpler.

So I'll have to guess what the problem is - you sure it's about internet access? TCP is agnostic to what OS the packets came from, really - that is, unless they're running some sort of packet analyzer that then requeues the data based on OS flavour. That would be highly irregular, not to mention counterproductive.

We've been having massive trouble getting Vista and Linux Servers to interoperate correctly, but mainly this has been in local networking/file sharing (Samba).

Namely, Vista has a default setting that will request LanMan V2 authentication from SMB/CIFS hosts. Since only MS products really support that protocol version well (Samba 2.x doesn't, Macs use Samba, not sure whether 2.x or 3.x), essentially you're screwed.

That is, unless you are prepared to do some research on the 'net and figure out all it takes to fix is a stupid registry key on Vista.

We only found german-language web pages detailing this, so let me translate:

HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Lsa

Change the value from 3 to 1 to force LanManV1 auth and make SMB/CIFS work again.

Thanks, MS!

Cheers,
Simon.

Microsoft's offer of help is fantastic, as they can issue a patch for Vista to fix the problem...only Vista users in Lund cannot connect to the internet to download the patch.

Bunch of muppets.

Regards,
Charlie

Monster Mash

Hi,

OK I spent a large part of yesterday chasing this up.

When I first phoned Monster I spoke to "David" who told me it was only North American Employer details that where stolen. You then posted the email from Monster Worldwide saying it was 1.3 million seekers details that have been stolen.

So I called back, this time spoke to "Sharon" who acknowledged it was seekers details. I asked what would happen in the event my identity was stolen as a result of this hack - my CV was on Monster which includes full name, address, DOB etc. Her response was that because "you've uploaded it to the internet, we're not responsible"

I was rather unhappy with that statement - I think it's a reasonable assumption on my part that any company I give my personal details take steps to ensure they are safe, and in the event they are stolen, then the company should pay the costs of cleaning up the mess.

Hacking is in a large part a social thing. Mostly it's about convincing someone you are who you say you are. Having the information that's on my CV would make a good start to this process. Hence my concern. Oddly Monster only seem to be worried about phishing attacks but hey ho.

Anyway, back to the story. She went on to hum and haw then said that "My operations manager, Steven, will call you about this query".

Well I'm delighted to say "Steven" did in fact call back. He didn't know who was liable but promised to request the relevant information from the fraud/legal department.

Here is the information he provided, about 30 minutes ago: -

Neil,

As promised, please find below the relevant extracts from Monsters International Media QA (082907)

Why did the company wait five days to tell people about the first incident?

When Monster first learned there had been an incident, it had to investigate that incident to determine what happened. Once the company determined which job seekers were affected, Monster notified individuals whose contact information was illegally downloaded. Protecting the job seekers who use our Web site is a top priority at Monster.

Has the system been hacked? How are people gaining illegal access to the database?

No. Job seekers' contact information was downloaded illegally by perpetrators who gained access to the site with actual customer logins and passwords that we presume were stolen.

What are people doing with the information they've taken?

Monster does not generally collect social security numbers or financial data about its job seekers, such as bank account information or credit card accounts. We believe illegally downloaded contact information may be used to lure job seekers into opening a "phishing" email that attempts to acquire sensitive financial information. This has been the case in similar attacks on other Web sites. That's why Monster is proactively notifying all job seekers with an active resume on Monster sites about preventative measures they can take to protect themselves from online fraud. Monster is also launching a comprehensive set of new systems and processes designed to enhance existing security and minimize such threats in the future.

Have you had any users complain that they've had their identities stolen as a result of this situation?

We're not aware of any.

How will you handle that if you do find out someone's been victimized?

We'll have to determine how to handle after that occurs. However, we are committed to responding to our job seekers in the most ethical and responsible manner.

So the last question and answer was my ultimate query. No doubt proving that having my identity stolen is a result of the Monster Hack would be a job in itself but it's nice to know they are at least putting the right foot forward.

No-one knows Intel's identity

I have seen the utter confusion in the IT media on AMD's ability to increase its market share in the face of the Intel Core 2 Duo, and am astounded that no one realizes the obvious truth of computer buyer economics. That is a simple fact that the general population has no more idea as to who Intel or AMD are, compared to Motorola or Samsung. To the average shopper, it just doesn't matter.

And just to put this into perspective, here is the simple reality of buying a computer: Intel and AMD DO NOT SELL COMPUTERS - so buyers do not care. People buy Dells, HP's and Gateways - they sell computers - and all major OEM's supply systems with either processor. Now most of the AMD based systems are less expensive with comparable performance, so guess which ones get bought more (especially with the current economic situation). 99% of the purchasing public are not going to buy the top of the line systems - they are looking for price performance system.

There is very little advertising by AMD (which at one time I thought was a mistake), and a lot by Intel - but ask the average person who Intel is and they might tell you they are three bald blue guys if you're lucky. Beyond that, nothing. Intel must even finally realize that since their newest commercials actual try to show that they are the processors in computer systems. (No more worthless blue guys or stupid dancers).

But once again, the average Joe just doesn't care. No one has ever come up to me and said “I just spend a ton of money on this laptop because it was the fastest, most expensive one available”.

They always say “this is the best system I could find for the money”. Sometimes they're Intel based, and sometimes they're AMD. And AMD laptops where also out selling Intel based systems, and why?

Could it be that people don't know the difference between Centrino and Celeron? I think most people now know not to buy Celeron based systems (fool me once but not twice - either that or most salesmen are AMD fanbois). Perhaps Intel had better start to reevaluate their marketing strategy, since the reality is it has never worked, but being a monopoly, it never really noticed until now.

Brian Martinez
Insight Global