June 30th

Microsoft to Make Windows XP64 OEM Only

Rumors have been spreading that MS is playing games with the 64-bit version of Windows, and I'm having trouble grasping what they are up to. According to The Inquirer, Microsoft is only going to release Windows 64 in an OEM version, which means that it will not be available for sale as a retail product on store shelves.

Something extremely fishy is going on here. Microsoft says that the 64-bit operating system is part of their MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) project, which is simply a way Microsoft tries to squeeze extra money out of their customers. They also mention their Software Assurance program in this regard, which they have used so far to charge good customers lots of extra money for products that never ship.

Microsoft typically sells operating systems in two formats. The retail format is more expensive, but is available as a standalone product on store shelves. The so-called OEM version typically comes in a multipack, and is less expensive to buy. However, you can't just pick them up at a store, they are sold through distributors to computer makers. OEM versions are supposed to be installed on new computers only, at least according to Microsoft.

The kicker here is that MS seems to be saying that this OEM version will be made available at retail stores, but that you will have to buy a piece of hardware to qualify to purchase it. Further, they say that you could buy something as cheap as a new network cable in order to qualify. Huh?

They go on to say that they are working on a scheme to allow people to trade an XP Pro license for a Windows64 license.  But that is obvious bunk, because you will most likely want the XP-64 for a new machine you are building, not to put on your existing computer. After the trade-in, MS will insist that you send them your old XP Pro CD to insure that you won't be using the two OSs on two different machines.

Something is very fishy here. I wonder how much collusion there is here between Microsoft and chipmaker Intel, who's 64-bit chips are having a rough go of it so far. AMD Opteron and Athlon64 processors have been ready for a 64-bit OS for almost a year now. But Intel is still dragging it's feet, and stumbling at every turn. I have to wonder if this involves Intel's influence, wherein Intel asked MS behind the scenes to not release Windows64 as a consumer-level product. Intel's 64-bit Itanium project is in serious jeopardy, and their adoption of AMD-like 64-bit consumer level processors is a painful, slow, and ongoing project. Perhaps this is an attempt by Intel, via MS, to delay as long as possible the adoption of low-cost 64-bit computing.

All I can say at this point is that if this is really how Microsoft is going to release the most important OS version they have come up with in the last 5 years, I'll be flabbergasted. Talk about messing with your customers for dubious reasons... this is truly bizarre.

                                       Dr. John

June 29th

More Intel Problems: Reverse Engineering 101

Intel said nobody wanted 64-bit computing except big businesses. They were wrong. AMD showed Intel how to make a good 64-bit/32-bit chip, but Intel didn't pay enough attention. When Intel reverse-engineered the AMD Opteron, they apparently missed the DMA IOMMU part, and as a result, Intel Xeon (Nocona) 64-bit processors can't properly address memory above 4GBs. 

Doh!

Here is what Red Hat has to say about the Nocona chip, after patching Linux to recognize it.

“Software IOTLB — Intel® EM64T does not support an IOMMU in hardware while AMD64 processors do. This means that physical addresses above 4GB (32 bits) cannot reliably be the source or destination of DMA operations. Therefore, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 2 kernel "bounces" all DMA operations to or from physical addresses above 4GB to buffers that the kernel pre-allocated below 4GB at boot time. This is likely to result in lower performance for IO-intensive workloads for Intel® EM64T as compared to AMD64 processors.”

Reverse engineering can be a tough thing, especially if you think you know what you are doing, when you really don't.

                                        Dr. John

June 26th

How Come Intel Keeps Messing Up?

If you've been reading any tech news in the last couple days you know that Intel had to recall all motherboards with its new Grantsdale (915 and 925) chipsets. A problem with the Integrated Controller Hub can cause the system to hang, or not boot at all. In addition to the chipset bugs, Intel is reporting numerous bugs in the 90nm Prescott Pentium 4 processor. These bugs also lead to system hangs under various circumstances.

You'd think Intel was new to this game. But the sad fact of the matter is that the worlds largest processor maker always seems to release product before it's ready. It may be the hegemony of the marketing department, or it could just be sloppy quality assurance and pre-ship testing. Regardless of the reason, these repeated mistakes not only harms public confidence in Intel's products, but also causes havoc among motherboard makers. Intel is notorious for infuriating manufacturers of motherboards by releasing shoddy product before it's ready, and switching to new product in midstream, leaving the mobo makers with piles of old stock.

On top of this, Intel has been accused of trying to intimidate motherboard makers with strong-arm tactics to not produce product for AMD processors. All in all what amazes me most is that any of these companies can stomach doing business with Intel under these circumstances. But Intel is the biggest game in town, leaving them little other choice.

The bottom line for me is that AMD is doing a much better job of putting out high-performance, reliable processors, without yanking motherboard maker's chains at every turn.

                                        Dr. John

June 25th

Which Politicians are on Your Side Over Copying?

You already know what I think about Republican Orin Hatch's pending "Induce Act", which seeks to make all methods of copying digital media illegal. This puts Hatch squarely on the side of large corporations, and at odds with consumer's fair use rights to make backup copies of goods they buy. 

Well now Democrat of Virginia Rick Boucher has stepped up with a direct assault on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is the current anti-copying law that passed in 1998. Representative Boucher has proposed the Digital Media Consumer's Rights Act (DMCRA) which would permit fair use copying of digital media that consumers own. This puts Democrat Boucher squarely on the side of consumers in the ongoing fight over digital content.

So which political party is working on your side, and which is working for the corporations? It is perhaps no coincidence that DMCRA looks a lot more like DeMoCRAt than it looks like Republican.

                                        Dr. John

June 23rd

Who Owns Your XBox?

An intern working for the Department of Energy (DOE) wrote me an interesting story that is worth sharing. Several groups of engineers, and interns at DOE, were asked to come up with an inexpensive remotely accessible camera system to monitor substations. Of the several proposals submitted, the one submitted by the interns was initially chosen because it was $400 less per unit than the next best solution.

Their solution was ingenious, and just what you'd expect from young PC enthusiasts. They used an XBox loaded with SuSE Linux and fitted with a web cam as the platform. The engineers were delighted, and amused at the same time. Everything was good.

That is until the lawyers looked over the end user license agreement, which stated that when you purchase an XBox from Microsoft, you are not actually buying the unit, you are only leasing it for an unspecified amount of time. Further, it says, if you modify the unit you are in breach of the license agreement, and are libel for fines up to $1500 per unit, the supposed "value" of the system.

So now you know who owns your XBox. What I'm wondering is when and how MS is going to start checking customers XBox installations to track down "altered" units. XBox Live anyone? :|

                                        Dr. John

Windows XP Service Pack 2 Not Ready for Prime Time?

An article at I am Not a Geek reviews release candidate 2 (RC2) of Windows service pack 2 (SP2). One of the main conclusions is that the new firewall/security features don't work as they are supposed to. But all in all, it looks like most of the additions to XP work, and do represent an improvement.  You can read the review here.

                                         Dr. John

June 21st

Spaceship One is Ready to Go

The first civilian spaceship is scheduled to blast off today from the Mohave desert. The project was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, perhaps because Bill Gates said that Longhorn would cost more than a moon shot. Perhaps not.

This will be a milestone in space flight, possibly ushering in (slowly) commercial space flight.  However, for some time to come it will be a rich person's pastime, but who knows where it might lead.

                                          Dr. John

June 18th

Orin Hatch is At It Again

One of the most obnoxious, self-righteous Senators, Republican Orin Hatch, is at it again with his crusade against all things that can copy. The guy is living in some kind of malevolent time warp, and wants to keep fighting the old VCR wars all over again. He doesn't want you to be able to make fair use copies of anything, ever again. His legislation is called the "Induce Act" (whatever the hell that means), and would make anyone liable for aiding or abetting in copyright infringement in any way, either by producing copying technologies, or by simply using a file sharing program to exchange songs.

This is a massive increase in the sweeping protections already offered by copyrights (which currently extend to 75 years after the death of the author), and is seen by most rational people as extreme overkill on the part of the entertainment industries, which have Orin Hatch in their back pocket.

You have until next week to write Orin the Moron here, to tell him what you think of his pet legislation. I suggest you also write your Senators, and Congressperson, and tell them that the law allows consumers fair  use rights to make copies of stuff they already own.

                                          Dr. John

June 17th

Where Were You When They Needed You?

The only people fighting hard for your fair use rights to copy your own software is about to close shop under an onslaught of lawsuits. 321 Studios is contemplating closing their doors rather than continue with multiple losing battles. The movie industry already shut down their software for making backups of your DVD movies, and now the computer game industry has filed multiple lawsuits against 321 Studios for their Games X Copy software, which lets you backup many of your games.

321 Studios has been working hard to lobby Congress on your behalf, in order to try to secure fleeting fair use rights. The movie industry tried to kill VHS recorders when they came out, and lost, then they tried to block DVD recorders, and lost. But now they have won with a very related issue, your rights to make backup copies of your expensive software and movies.

I've been writing my Senators and Congressperson about this issue for some time now, often spurred on by 321 Studios newsletters which outlined their efforts to lobby Congress to provide fair use rights to backup disks. But apparently not enough people wrote in, and the pressure never developed.

So we are going to lose this round, because 321 Studios didn't get enough support from the public to continue their fight on our behalf.

                                           Dr. John

June 15th

Your Next Computer

You've been thinking about a new computer, but things are changing so fast, you're not sure how to proceed. My recommendation right now is to wait for new technologies to debut, not to mention waiting for the bugs to get worked out. Many things are going to be changing over the next 4 months, and some of those changes are worth waiting for.  

To start, the AMD Athlon64 is going through a change from 940-pin sockets to 939-pin sockets. The upshot of this change is that you will be able to use faster, less expensive standard DDR memory, as opposed to registered ECC memory that is required on 940-pin motherboards. Also, clock speeds on the Athlon64 should improve as well. It is not certain when motherboards will be designed to accept faster DDR3 memory, but that change is probably not going to happen until 2005.

Next we have the upcoming video card changes. The ATI Radeon X800XT and the NVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra are just starting to trickle out, and are about twice as fast as the Radeon 9800 Pro.  That's a huge jump in performance for a single product cycle. But that's not the end of the changes in the works for video cards.  Within several months motherboards will debut that will use "PCI-Express" graphics cards, which will be the new standard connection for high-speed graphics accelerators. This change will not boost speed dramatically at first, but should reduce the bus bottleneck in future graphics cards.

Also to debut soon will be dual-layer DVD burners with over 8GBs of space per disc.  Further in the future will be "Blue-Ray" DVD burners with much higher data density and capacity, but those will probably not be ready for PCs until 2005 or even later.

I think that the improvements which are worth waiting for now are the Athlon64 939-pin PCI-Express motherboards, and PCI-Express cards from ATI and NVidia.  Unfortunately, that probably means waiting until the end of Summer or early Fall to upgrade to a new system with the newest technology. I'm going to wait until these pieces are in place before upgrading my own system.

                                           Dr. John

June 12th

My Heroes

The Folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have decided to start what they call the "Patent Busting Project".  The aim is to identify and kill IT patents that never should have seen the light of day, but somehow got past the overworked and relatively clueless patent reviewers. Examples of patents that actually made it into the books include one-click online shopping (what an innovation!), hyperlinks (that sounds new), paying online with a credit card (what genius invented that?), and online shopping carts (what will they think of next). Obviously, somebody didn't do their job, and the end result is joy extreme and riches untold for IT and IP lawyers.

For taking on this thankless task, I give the EFF my Hero Award.

After they tackle the seemingly endless task of cleaning up after the sloppy and ill-informed US Patent Office, maybe they can take on Congress to change copyright laws so that companies like SCO can't buy old copyrights, and then accuse everyone who writes anything related of theft. I would also like to see copyrights enter the public domain sooner (rather than 75 years after the authors death).  And finally, the government only seems intent on protecting corporations rights, while ignoring the fair use rights of consumers. That also has to change. 

The EFF has a lot on it's plate, but this looks like a good start to me.

                                           Dr. John

June 10th

PCI Express Video Cards and Mobos Near

In less than 2 weeks, motherboards and video cards that conform to the new PCI-Express bus will make their slow, and probably messy appearance. I remember well how much of a pain it was switching to AGP back in 1998 or 1999, and I can imagine this switch will be just as painful for home computer builders and retail builders alike. Half the time, the drivers didn't work, the motherboards didn't work, and especially, the AGP cards didn't work. Things got sorted out over a 6 month period, but until the manufacturers and programmers figured out how to get AGP working right, I can honestly say it was a disaster. We all can hope that this time, with PCI-Express, they did the testing, fixing and tweaking before the debut, rather than waiting until long after it.

But for those of you who currently own a regular old AGP Radeon, and like to keep your drivers updated (Note: Dude-Walker never updates his drivers:), ATI has just released the Catalyst 4.6 drivers, which include a number of fixes.

                                           Dr. John

June 8th

Yeah, They Named it Simperon

Or was that Semperon?

Simpering?

It's another one of those wonderfully stupid, highly trademarkable product names.  OK. AMD has done it again with the crazy product name thing. It's going to be their 64-bit "Duron-class" processor, and it's called....

I can't say it.

The worst part is we're stuck with it, and that means that years from now people will be saying (here goes):

 "Yeah, this baby's got a Sempron!"...

...Sempron?

Really?

Shit.

                                           Dr. John

Linksys Router Security Update

Linksys routers are very popular, but they have a vulnerability that was recently announced, known as the BOOTP exploit.  The good news is that Linksys has firmware updates that patch the problem, and they are available for all versions of the most popular models. Updates for the BEFSR41 router model can be found here. The main firmware download page is here.

                                            Dr. John

June 6th

SCO Doomed.... Doomed!

Things are getting pretty scary for poor SCO, as their case against IBM continues it's inexorable death-spiral into litigation purgatory, or litigation hell if they can't be purged of their sins. After months of reviewing IBM's source code for Unix, SCO has been unable to find any Linux code that infringes their IP rights. So now, as you would expect from IP con artists, SCO says that they need to see more source code, and developers notes, and a detailed history of how IBM's version of Unix was written. Only then, they say, will they be able to show the court the infringing code.

Remember, this is well into court proceedings that were initiated on the contention that SCO knew about specific infringing computer code, and moreover, that it involved millions of lines of code. Remember how they went all over the country with their dog and pony show, and a stack of non-disclosure agreements, to show the skeptics what was supposed to be just a tiny fraction of that infringing stuff? And now, when it comes time to turn over their cards to show the court, they don't even have a pair of deuces. As Paul Thurrott said over at Windows Network, it reminds me of those weapons of mass destruction that the Bush Administration said were in Iraq. There were tons of them, and they even knew where they were. The parallels seem spooky.

Now the question of the penalties for filing false legal actions becomes particularly pertinent.  As I mentioned a couple months ago, if this case is exposed as a scam to drive up stock prices and extort money from Linux users, the penalties are going to be very significant. Let's see, making false declarations to the court, conspiracy, racketeering, and a host of other related charges. If I were the court involved in the case, I'd be keeping a close eye on Darl McBride's airplane ticket buying activities.

                                            Dr. John

June 3rd

Doom III Delayed Until July 20th, at Least

If you can trust the "estimated ship date" at various game sales sites (which you can't), Doom III will not ship until July 20th, at the earliest.  Previously these web sites had taken "pre-orders" for Doom III with the estimated ship date listed as June 1st.  Yeah, right.

OK, so now I say it's time to start office betting pools to guess the REAL release dates for long-delayed games, including Doom III, Half Life 2, and (ha!) Duke Nukem Forever.

Intel Irritates Case Makers with BTX

Intel has been pushing computer enclosure makers and motherboard manufacturers to switch to Intel's new "BTX" case/mobo design. But manufacturers at the Computex meeting in Taipei are having none of it and say "No we are not interested in BTX... it not make Intel so happy, but we don't care".

The whole thing revolves around Intel's poorly designed Pentium4 chip, with excessive heat dissipation problems. The BTX re-design was intended to allow for more airflow over the mainboard, while also providing a large metal bracket for bolting on the beefy kilogram heat sink for Intel's infernal silicon inferno. The motherboard and case makers complained that the redesigns would cost too much money, and that Intel still hadn't even finalized all the modifications.  Plus, they added, AMD's chips don't require larger heat sinks or any changes to the current designs.

So if we are all very lucky, Intel will lose this fight, and motherboard and case makers can go back to figuring out how to make better products, instead of just following Intel around like a bunch of lost puppies.

                                            Dr. John

June 2nd

Video Card Makers Downbeat

Hercules has announced it is leaving the video card business, because there isn't enough money to be made there.  It may be the beginning of a mass exodus of video card makers from the market, and they place the blame on NVidia and ATI.  Both companies sell chips to third parties like Hercules to make graphics cards with, but they put restrictions on what the board makers can do with the chips.  For example, ATI does not let it's partners overclock the mid-range cards like the Radeon 9600XT. The end result is that all boards perform just about the same, and the board making companies can't distinguish their products from their competitors. According to the report, NVidia is even worse than ATI, and treats it's partners like dirt. If this keeps up, ATI and NVidia will be stuck making their own boards, and that means lots less choice of what color PCB board new cards will be made on, but no change in performance. 

In another hardware note, AMD is officially debuting the 939-pin Athlon64, and motherboards are on the way.  The main difference is that these new chips go on upcoming motherboards that use regular DDR memory, rather than slower and more expensive registered ECC memory. The core of the 939-pin CPUs has also been tweaked.

                                            Dr. John

June 1st

Recent Linus Linux Move Controversial

Linus Torvalds has added a requirement for submitting code for the Linux kernel. Now, when submitting code, the writer must fill out a Certificate of Origin field that states "Signed off by..." with the programmers contact info.  While this seems like a small and simple change to ensure each piece of code is attributed to a specific programmer, some critics suggest that it is akin to saying that the old method was sloppy or prone to IP theft.  While it is not really such an admission, it does appear to raise the question nonetheless. But because there is already a database of contributors to Linux, this flap is probably going to die down quickly.   

Also interesting on the Linux front is the deafening silence from SCO in recent weeks.  The only announcement they have made is to rebut the Australian Open Source Groups recommendation that businesses ignore any legal letters from SCO. Over previous months, SCO could be counted on to make outlandish claims, or file reckless lawsuits, just to stay in the headlines.  Apparently, they have decided the scorched IP policy wasn't working in their favor, and have decided to rethink their cockamamie plans. I'll be interested to see what plan B is.

                                            Dr. John