December 27th

Intel Falling Further Behind AMD

A nice article at the Inq. shows how AMD was smart enough to build-in capabilities for dual-core Athlon-64 chips right from the start. Intel is making a big deal out of possible dual-core CPUs in the future, but they are playing catch-up to AMD in just about every way now.  And Intel's poor design decisions in the past (long pipeline, and clunky Hyperthreading) are coming back to bite them, and that's why there is talk of a 32/64-bit "Pentium V" in the works.  All of this can only help slow Intel down, while AMD is running at a full gallop. Intel's arrogance is finally causing real pain for the company, and it is a wonder of corporate arm-twisting that has kept the likes of Dell in the position of Intel lap dog for so long. I'll bet my bippy that Dell gets lots of requests for Athlon64 systems now, and their competitors that offer them will certainly gain market share as long as Dell remains a one trick pony.

                                              Dr. John

PS, Couldn't resist any longer, and ordered myself an AthlonFX51 and NForce3 motherboard yesterday! Expensive... but Schweet!~ :)

December 26th

SCO a Go-Go!

Novell has registered copyrights to UNIX System V Releases 2, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.2/386, 4.0, 4.1, 4.1ES, 4.1ES/386, 4.2, and 4.2MP. They own the patents, so the copyrights should be a cinch. That means SCO is SOL (sorry... out of luck). 

If investors are paying attention (do they actually do that while sipping Mia-Tais in the Bahamas?), SCO stock should soon plummet. 

Oh what a tangled web we weave....

                                              Dr. John

December 25th

Intel No Longer the Chip Leader 

Rumors are swirling that Intel is frantically trying to play catch-up with AMD by throwing together an AMD wanna-be 64-bit chip code named Yamhill. This rumor is so persistent, and so long-lived, that there almost certainly has to be something to it. If true, then Intel has lost it's way, and is now the follower, not the leader.  This would be a severe blow to their reputation, and moral. 

I said from day one when the Pentium4 was released that Intel was more interested in marketing than in chip design.  The P4 had an absurdly long, unwieldy instruction pipeline that was meant for only one purpose... to artificially inflate the GHz rating. They didn't design the chip to be as fast as possible, but rather to have the highest GHz rating.  All sales, no engineering.

AMD went the other way, and has been blasted ever since on their "PR" performance ratings.  But at least they were honest about making a fast chip at a good price. Then they went one step further, and added 64-bit extensions to the same type of chip design, and came up with a very solid 32-bit, 64-bit hybrid chip that beats the silicon off of Intel's P4 chips that run hundreds of MHz "faster". AMD has been an honest player all along.

What did Intel do for 64-bit computing?  The Itanium, which failed, followed by the Itanium II, which is failing.  Both chips require entire new operating systems and applications to be written specifically for the expensive, unpopular chip.  That's true arrogance, and it's come back to bite Intel in the ass.  They thought... "We're Intel... the industry goes where we say so".  Wrong!  Not with lower cost, higher value, 32-bit compatible 64-bit chips on the market. So now, instead of the industry scrambling to follow Intel's 64-bit lead, Intel is playing catch-up with AMD, who made the right decisions from the start. And considering how short the supply is of Opteron and Athlon64 CPUs at distributors, they must be selling like hot cakes. 

If Intel is disingenuous enough to release a 32-bit/64-bit "Yamhill" chip, they will have lost all credibility in the IT industry, and they will send the Itanium II to the dustbin of history after billions of dollars wasted on R&D. See what arrogance gets you in the IT industry?

Happy Holidays, and a great new year to everyone!

                                              Dr. John

December 24th

RIAA Gets Lump of Coal for the Holidays 

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is swearing to carry on it's orgy of litigation against music lovers, despite losing the most recent law suit.  A US District Court ruled that the RIAA's attempts to force ISP's to divulge the names of people who download music was illegal. The ruling states that the RIAA has no right to issue subpoenas against ISPs, thus preventing the RIAA from continuing their crusade against music lovers. But the RIAA is not detered.

"This is a disappointing procedural decision, but it only changes the process by which we will file lawsuits against online infringers," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. Maybe she should have just been truthful, and said something like: "We think our customers are a bunch of lying, stealing bastards, and we are going to put them all behind bars". That would be refreshing.

So, do you really want to support these people by buying music CDs? I stopped buying them years ago, now I just play video games.

Happy Holidays All!! :)

                                              Dr. John

December 21st

Is Microsoft Stalling Windows-64? 

As far as I can tell, Windows-64 could have easily been out in beta form by now.  But instead, we hear almost nothing about it.  I've seen at least one conspiracy theory story about it in the last few weeks, and I've got to wonder if MS is stalling while Intel gets a crappy response to AMD's Athlon64 slapped together.  But that doesn't sound right either, because Intel may not be able to afford threatening their long-suffering Itanium line of CPUs with a cheapo Athlon64 wanna-be. But maybe Itanium sales are slumping even worse than before the AMD Opteron came out, in which case they may be in a real jam as far as the Itanium goes.  I've got to think Itanium was much too expensive an R&D project to dump, no matter how poor the sales, but then again, it can't be reworked to run existing code very well, and that may be it's biggest pitfall.

AMD's 64-bit CPUs are selling very well, and many people are just waiting for Spring when the 939 pin models make it to market before upgrading their systems.  I'm going to upgrade my system as soon as I'm happy with the 939-pin motherboard offerings.  And Microsoft could be raking in the money now on a 64-bit version of Windows if they had it ready. And they really want an interim OS to boost sales before Longhorn (or should I say Long way off Horn?). But instead, everyone just waits and wonders. Has Intel asked for more time to get an Athlon64 clone ready? Would anyone buy a more expensive, less well designed knock-off CPU from Intel just out of brand loyalty?  I haven't put an Intel CPU in one of my systems since the Celeron 300A. I personally don't like the Pentium4's architecture, and I don't like Intel's methods of doing business, so I'm quite content to stick with AMD for the foreseeable future. 

                                              Dr. John

December 16th

SCO Loves Linux, and Couldn't Live Without It. 

A review of the latest release of UnixWare from SCO over at OS News is very enlightening, or perhaps... entertaining. Several of the interesting findings include the fact that UnixWare is very expensive compared with the competition, compiling applications is very difficult, and there aren't many enterprise applications that will run on it. The solution for the last problem, lack of applications, can be solved by an interesting feature... the Linux Kernel Personality (LKP). This lets you pop over to Linux when necessary, and benchmarking tests showed that applications ran just as fast in the LKP as they did in UnixWare.  As such, it seems likely that many UnixWare users would be forced to use the built-in Linux emulator, rather than the actual Unix OS (making you wonder what you are paying so much money for). Perhaps SCO might even find some irony in the fact that their Linux emulator is the only feature that makes UnixWare usable in a business environment. 

But that's not the only reason SCO loves Linux.  Without Linux, SCO would be the least known, least lucrative business selling Unix. They have a terrible product when compared with offerings such as Solaris, and they sell it for absurdly high prices.  They have a tiny user base, and they aren't gaining any new customers.  So you see, without Linux, there would be no SCO.

                                              Dr. John

December 12th

Electronic Voting 101 

Bob Cringely has his latest installment on electronic voting posted, and I just wish that the lawmakers in my state, Maryland, would read it.  They just bought $56 million worth of e-voting machines without any audit or analysis. Of course they are probably too busy raising money for the next election to worry about important public policy, but still, I'd love it if they would give the topic a quick look.  And if you are so inclined, here is Mr. Cringely's assessment.

                                              Dr. John

Beware Windows XP Service Pack2 

It's not out yet, but a page over at Microsoft suggests that XP SP2 might just make a bunch of programs and online games stop dead in their tracks.  The new service pack is meant to block up some of the huge gaps in Windows security, but in the process may stomp all over existing code in many games and applications.  The service pack will close down unused ports (good), but will also turn on Windows kludgey software firewall (bad).  So you'll probably want to shut that off if you do install SP2 (just make sure your connection goes through a router, which has a hardware firewall).  There is also a new "memory protection" feature that is meant to block buffer overruns.  This one is almost guaranteed to mess with some existing Windows programs. Also, if someone sends you an email attachment, there is an increased chance that the attachment will be blocked, even if it's not a virus or other bug. Internet Explorer may also refuse to download certain content after the patch. 

Service pack 2 will be available soon. In any case, all you XP users out there will absolutely want to use the "rollback" feature, and make sure you create a new rollback before you install XP SP2. And then cross your fingers before proceeding.

Don't you just love Windows?

                                             Dr. John

December 10th

IBM Linux TV Commercials 

Many of you may have noticed, and not really thought about it very much, but the current round of Linux commercials from IBM is a watershed in the development of the Linux operating system. The commercials are one minute long, and I've seen as many as 3 of them per hour on stations like CNN. That's a heck of a lot of ad money to be sinking into bolstering the image of open source software. In some ways, it almost reminds me of the original IBM PC campaign in the early 80's.  It's big, and it's Blue.

I suspect this ad campaign is meant more to torment the anti-Linux crowd, including especially Microsoft and SCO, than it is to get people to rush out and buy Linux.  It isn't even a real commercial in that sense, IBM isn't asking people to buy Linux, they are just saying "He's Learning, Growing".  To me, this is one of the most unusual ad campaigns I can remember; a huge company touting the benefits of an open source operating system, without really pushing for sales of a product. It is meant to boost the image and visibility of Linux more than anything else.  IBM wants to make Linux a household word, and if they keep pouring money into it, they might even succeed. 

So far, Microsoft's ubiquitous commercials haven't changed in response, they still drone on about "your potential, our passion" ad nauseum.  That may change if IBM's Linux commercials start to get under Bill's skin.

                                             Dr. John

December 8th

More on E-Voting Concerns

Bob Cringely has an editorial on e-voting machines from Diebold systems which keeps the pressure on the voting machine maker for the lack of an auditable paper trail. His conclusion is that the government rushed to institute electronic voting in a way that is almost certain to fail due to time and lack-of-knowledge constraints. The people running elections, who know nothing about the new machines, will need to figure out how to make the systems work in a time frame that is probably prohibitive.  

But the major complaint is the lack of a paper trail that would permit election officials to check the results that the machines generate on election night.  Mr. Cringely properly points out that all other Diebold automated machines, from ATM machines to ticket dispensers, produce an auditable paper output that can be checked against the electronic numbers.  The only system that Diebold makes that does not produce a paper readout is their electronic voting machine. Kind of strange, wouldn't you say?

                                             Dr. John

December 7th

How is the Stock Market Like On-Line Gaming?

There was an article at the NY Times yesterday that was kind of scary for stock investors.  Sometime on Friday, a sell order was placed for Corinthian Colleges stock on a Gr8Trade computer connected to the market system. "There was some sort of system glitch," said Andrew Goldman, executive vice president of Instinet Group. The result was that the system went into a repeated loop of sell orders on the stock, which of course started sending the price down, down down. After awhile, Nasdaq saw something was odd, and stopped trading on the stock.  Nasdaq contacted Corinthian Colleges, who replied that there was no reason for the rapid decline in stock price.  For some odd reason, without figuring out what was going on, Nasdaq resumed trading on the stock.  But many of the earlier buy orders were canceled, so investors were selling stocks they didn't even own! The end result was that lots of people lost money due to a computer glitch.

This sort of brings up the question of the reliability and integrity of our entire stock market. It's bad enough that buying and selling stocks is like buying something on eBay, or playing an on-line computer game.  Network lag, and just the slightest hesitation before clicking the mouse button can add up to financial ruin, loss of the auction, or getting fragged. With computer games, it's obviously not that big a deal, but when we're talking about the very heart and soul of our nation's economic system, I think something more reliable than a teetering PC network barely suitable even for LAN gaming might be in order. 

                                             Dr. John

December 6th

SCO's Slow Death Spiral Begins

We've all been waiting for SCO to show the Linux code they allege has been misappropriated from Unix.  SCO has refused, saying that would let Linux programmers "fix the problem".  Of course that gives their hand away right there, because they DON'T want the code fixed... there is nothing to fix with the code, and SCO knows it.  SCO wants everyone to think the code is questionable for as long as possible, thus keeping their stock prices artificially inflated, and keeping those royalty payments flowing from companies dumb enough to fall for SCO's bull. 

But that shell game has come to an end.  The judge in the case sided with IBM, and said that SCO has 30 days to show the offending code, or forfeit the case.  The 30 day period starts on Wednesday, which might make Thursday a particularly good day to short some SCO stock.  Of course if SCO really has found offending code, it may still be too early to rule out a protracted court battle.  That's what makes this 30-day waiting period so interesting.

Even more interesting is the fact that David Boies, the big-time lawyer for SCO was a no show at the court hearing.  Darl McBride's brother was there to represent SCO!  Wow, that's a bit of a downgrade on the legal representation, wouldn't you say?  

The judge in the case also said that the discovery SCO was to provide on the offending code required "specificity", meaning they need to actually show all of the code in question, and can no longer be vague and misleading.  That pretty much wipes out their bag of tricks, now doesn't it? 

In a final turn of the knife, Linus Torvalds, the original inventor of Linux, has shown that US Patent law explicitly permits the exchange of "anything of value" between copyright holders, including the exchange of copyrights!  So SCO's entire case about the GPL being unconstitutional because no money exchanged hands is completely destroyed.  I wonder if it is beginning to dawn on SCO's legal counsel, David Boies, just how hopeless this case is. I probably wouldn't have shown up either.  I'd love to have a line on when McBride and Boies decide to start selling shares of SCO!

                                             Dr. John

December 5th

SCO Says Greed is Codified in US Constitution

Darl McLied, er, McBride... the SCO of CEO, er, the CEO of SCO, has put out another is a long series of very long open letters to the Open Software Community telling them why they should all stop working on Linux. This letter was pretty much as vacuous and unsubstantiated as all the others, but that's the name of the game here.  Don't talk facts, talk dirt and obfuscation.  

The thrust of the letter is that, according to McBride and his well paid lawyers, the US Constitution itself is squarely on the side of SCO. Indeed, it seems the founding fathers had this exact intellectual property litigation in mind over 200 years ago when they wrote: "Congress shall have Power … [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

The SCO argument goes something like this... "If you don't make money on something... you're violating the Constitution."  That is a very self-serving reading of that particular passage from the Constitution, and seems to miss some of the more salient points therein.  For example, take the phrase "for limited times"... the Unix code that SCO is complaining about is from the 1970s, almost 30 years ago, and much of it has been in the public domain for much of that time.

Next take the phrase "...to Authors and Inventors...", and remember that SCO invented and wrote absolutely nothing.  They bought some of the copyrights to an old version of Unix, and did not even purchase the patents.  So for them to be claiming that the US Constitution is on their side in this fight is absurd.  They are not the authors or the inventors of Unix, and if the founding fathers knew how their words were being twisted by this twisted bunch of shysters, they'd be turning over and over in their graves.

Finally, I'd like to point out how ridiculous the SCO argument really is.  Their contention is that the only reason anyone does anything in this world is because of greed.  They say that without personal greed, and the insatiable desire for money, the entire world would fall apart, and therefore the courts need to stop this madness of "open source software".  That's right folks, our entire system is based on the fact that people like McBride should be allowed to buy some old copyrights, and then threaten the world with litigation and licensing fees, and the courts need to back them up on this or the world economic system will crumble like a house of cards. Hell... it's in the US Constitution! Ask Darl.

                                             Dr. John

December 2nd

Microsoft Longhorn Debuts at Only $1.⁵⁰! (in China)

Years before it is scheduled to be released, an early beta version of Longhorn is on sale, illegally, on the streets of China.  The price works out to about one and a half dollars US.  

This report clearly makes the point I have been yapping about for years, that Microsoft needs to deal with software piracy in Asia before they crack down on their good, paying customers in the US. The vast majority of software piracy occurs in Asia, and the software makers know it.  But it's lots easier to crack down on Joe PC in the US, than it is to prosecute the real pirates overseas. 

                                             Dr. John

So You Say You Want to E-Vote?

Diebold systems has been in the news of late. They make one of the most commonly used electronic voting machines, and they have been in a legal tussle with various web sites that posted internal Diebold memos which cast doubt on the system's integrity and security.  Diebold recently announced that they were going to drop those legal actions, but that doesn't end the struggle. 

There is a very good article today over at the New York Times that outlines what has happened so far, and why we should be concerned.  Indeed, the strange goings on should leave voters with an uneasy feeling. One tid-bit that caught my attention was when the CEO of Diebold systems declared at a recent Republican fund raiser, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Not exactly the paragon of independence and impartiality, now is it?

                                            Dr. John