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Gear News Archive: September 2003
September 30th Make Your Own Political Web Site It may go down in history as the first political campaign with a do-it-yourself website kit. The 'Dean for America' campaign has released what they call the Deanspace Community Kit as a free download under the GPL public software license. They state: "These kits are based on a wonderful piece of open-souce software called Drupal. The Drupal codebase was customized by the DeanSpace all-volunteer development community. The graphics were created by the Dean gSquad, another volunteer group. It's been a labor of love". September 28th Opting For The Opteron? I've posted a mini-review of the Opteron and the Asus SK8N NForce3 motherboard, which focuses on setting up these new systems, rather than on benchmarking. If you were thinking of opting for an Opteron system in the near future, I recommend you take a few minutes to look it over, it might make you decide that patience is a virtue. September 27th So Quiet, You Can Hear a Pin Drop AMD has been very quiet about their 3 new socket designs for the Opteron/Athlon64 line of processors. Aaron Rouse of The Inquirer has the scoop on why there are 3 designs, and why they are dropping one pin from the 940 pin design on future motherboards. First, the 754-pin design has lots less pins because it has a single memory bank. So memory bandwidth will be almost cut in half on these Athlon-64 motherboards as compared with the Opteron or Athlon FX51. (So don't buy the regular Athlon64 if you want dual-channel DDR, because it doesn't support it). The 940-pin socket design is the original one with dual bank DDR memory support, and it requires a 6 or 7 layered motherboard design, which is expensive. When AMD drops one pin to the 939 design, it will allow for 4 layered motherboards, which are substantially less expensive to produce. But you still get the awesome memory bandwidth of the Opteron/Athlon FX51 dual-channel DDR. With this in mind, I suggest that any Athlon FX51 wanabees wait until Spring to purchase, because the newer 939 pin chips and motherboards will be out, and so will Windows with 64-bit extensions (maybe). Finally, by then the Athlon FX51 will drop in price from it's currently exorbitant $800!!! At those prices, I can wait. September 26th Do-Not-Call List On Again, Off Again When 50 million voters get angry, lawmakers find sudden alacrity and motivation. In record time, the House and Senate passed legislation that gives the FTC the explicit right to implement and enforce the national do-not-call list. But because they are duplicitous at heart, they exempted themselves and charities from the list, and this prompted another federal judge (Edward W. Nottingham) to immediately slap another injunction on the list, because it creates two unequal groups, and "limits speech" for one group (you call that speech?). Some people are thinking this new case might go all the way to the Supreme Court, unless the lawmakers remove all exemptions from the list. In another very interesting twist, the original judge who blocked the list has been deluged with calls from angry voters, after several web sites published his home and office phone numbers. Oh the irony of it. Now if we can just get the phone number of Judge Nottingham!! ;) September 25th 2.2GHz Athlon FX-51 Beats 3.2GHz Pentium4 Extreme Intel's interminably long instruction pipeline in the Pentium4 just can't be compensated for by a huge L3 cache. That's my conclusion concerning the benchmarks coming out showing the slower-clocked AMD product still beating the newest P4 in many benchmarks. And that's just in 32-bit mode! Only the AMD product can also be used in 64-bit mode. And based on prices I'm seeing, the Athlon FX-51 will be priced lower than the Intel part. As I've said before, Intel is playing a risky game here trying to one-up AMD at every turn. This time they had no choice but to put out a Pentium4 that is as powerful, or more powerful, than their extremely expensive Xeon processors. I just don't see why corporations would pay more for a similar or inferior product. Maybe Intel thinks that businesses won't know anything about the "P4 Extreme Edition", or that they wouldn't trust a "gamers CPU". It seems to me that a couple of thousand bucks can be a significant incentive, especially if you're buying lots of servers boxes at once. September 24th Judge Delights Telemarketers, Infuriates 50 Million Voters U.S. District Judge Lee R. West must have a great need to be hated. Or at least he doesn't care how many people he greatly angers. On Monday in the US District Court in Oklahoma City, Judge West ruled in favor of Telemarketers, and halted implementation of the new national "do-not-call" list, which was supposed to take place on October 1st. The judge ruled that the FTC has not been explicitly granted the authority to implement the do-not-call list, and therefore it can't be enforced. This means that the sleaze balls will be able to call you at all times of the day or night, despite the fact you've put your name on a list that indicates your complete lack of interest. Judge West may have made a few friends in the telemarketing industry, but he's really pissed off 50 million voters, and I'm one of them. September 23rd It's About Time... or As The Worm Turns The MS Blaster Worm struck havoc on the Internet over the last few weeks, and there are lingering traces. I have heard of several cases where computers could no longer log onto certain web sites for unknown reasons. You try to participate in a NY Times poll online... and it just repeats in a loop without letting you vote. You try to log onto a web site where you are registered, and it just sits there doing nothing. Then it goes back to the logon screen. You can't even save some games in progress! Sound familiar? Maybe your computer is in a time warp. One unpleasant side effect of the MS Blaster worm seems to be that it changes your computer's date to some outlandish setting such as 2083! The end result is that cookies go crazy, and you can't log onto any web site that requires cookies. All you need to do is change the date to something more reasonable... say 2003, and you should be fine. Athlon-64 Needs Registered ECC Memory Hi Everyone. We're back after hurricane Isabel took down half the power lines in our area. Four days without power can seem like a minor eternity. And one thing that the power outage kept me from over the last 4 days was testing a new Opteron setup on an NForce3 motherboard. I could have completed the testing last week before the hurricane, but I had to wait almost a week to get some Samsung PC3200 Registered ECC DDR memory shipped here. What's the deal with that you ask? It goes like this. When NVidia tells you that you need "Registered" ECC memory, they mean it. Registered... not just ECC. ECC stands for "error correction circuitry", which checks the data being transferred to make sure it is OK. But what is Registered memory? It has extra data registers that hold data for one clock cycle before transferring the bits to the motherboard, and this increases reliability. The problem is that for years, the Registered ECC memory market has been fairly small, because this type of error correcting memory was only used in servers. But now, all Opteron and Athlon-64 motherboards will REQUIRE Registered ECC memory. Some folks will be upset that this type of memory costs more, but the much more frustrating part is that it is really hard to find Registered ECC memory. I had to hunt all over the place to find anything faster than PC2100 Registered DIMMs. I finally found some PC3200 Samsung memory, and it works great on the Asus SK8N motherboard. I expect that AMD is about to find out that all that worrying about motherboard support and a good supply of Athlon-64 chips for the upcoming debut wasn't the entire enchilada. Without a healthy supply of high-speed Registered ECC DDR memory, a lot of people are going to be sitting around with a pile of parts, waiting for the FedEx guy to arrive with some memory that will make it all work. Been there! September 17th Intel to Debut Pentium 4 Extreme for Gamers Intel announced yesterday at the Intel Developers Forum that they would be releasing a new version of the Pentium 4 processor geared toward gamers. Seems a bit hard to believe that Intel would put that much effort into pleasing gamers, but there you have it. The Extreme version will actually have an incredible 2.5MB of on-die L2 cache. Yes, that's me-ga-bytes (oogle). What I'm curious about is what kind of price will Intel offer this beast at? Intel has been known in the past to make the serious mistake of offering a "less expensive gamers chip" that accidentally beats their much, much more expensive chips (even server chips) in almost every benchmark. With 2.5MB of L2 cache and a speed rating of 3.2GHz, I expect the Extreme P4 will beat the pants off of the Xeon. Companies will quickly comprehend this fact, and decide to buy the Extreme gamers chip for their servers instead of the expensive Xeon. Should be interesting to watch as Intel scrambles to fix the boo boo. A Letter to David Boies David Boies is a high-powered legal force in the US, and it was a bit of a surprise to me when I heard that he was the lawyer representing SCO in their case against IBM. Knowing that Mr. Boies has scruples, I decided that a letter was in order. I sent the following letter to Mr. Boies today. Dear Mr. Boies, Link to
Mr. Boies emal: dboies@bsfllp.com September 15th Microsoft's Evil Plans Have you ever wondered why Bill Gates was so willing to lose so much money over the Xbox? Maybe you thought it was just another feeble attempt at taking over a growing market? Maybe. But just maybe it's because the Xbox is a perfect test tool to try out new, insidious technologies to control hardware and software from MS Central. Case in point. Microsoft will automatically update the "dashboard" software on your Xbox next time you log on to play an Internet game. No way around it, no way to prevent it. And when this insidious update is in place, you will no longer be able to easily install Linux on your Xbox. No big deal... right? You weren't going to be doing that anyway. But what this demonstrates clearly is that Microsoft is in complete, remote control of your Xbox. They control the horizontal, they control the vert.... you get the idea. Almost makes you wish you had bought a Playstation2, doesn't it? New Hard Drive Technology Hard drives have been getting bigger and faster... fast! But that trend is slowly slowing. Not to worry, hard drive manufacturers have a few new tricks up their sleeves, including "perpendicular recording heads". What the heck is that? It is a way to increase storage density, and possibly access times. Current longitudinal recording heads put data bits side by side only, but perpendicular heads can also record bits at various depths in the recording media. Sounds pretty cool. The word is that such hard drives will debut sometime in 2005, with initial drives having 150 to 200GB platters. September 14th More Bad News for NVidia TweakTown has posted a review of the upcoming DX9 version of the benchmark Aquamark, and how the Radeon and GeForce FX stack up. As expected, the Radeon wins in general, but with the new beta Detonator 5 drivers, the GeForce FX does better than in previous tests. In a few cases it even beats the Radeon. So all is not lost for NVidia, but they obviously still have some work to do. The new Aquamark should be out tomorrow. September 13th Poor GeForce FX DX9 Performance Confirmed Scott over at the Tech Report has some preliminary Half Life 2 benchmarks posted, and has confirmed the relatively poor performance of the entire line of GeForce FX cards. Newer drivers may help a little, but obviously, folks who stuck by NVidia's side will feel a little burned when playing HL2 at 20 fps. In fact, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is more expensive than the Radeon 9800 Pro, which definitely makes it a less attractive offering. The good news for Radeon 9800 Pro owners is that the game should be quite playable at 1024x768x32-bit, with frame rates ranging from about 30fps to 270fps. Compare this with the GeForce FX using especially coded FX drivers, which ranged from 15fps to 240fps. Not bad, but remember that is with special drivers written specifically for the FX cards. The results with the current Detonator drivers were much, much worse (15fps to 110fps). Other quick comparisons include (1024x768x32): E3 techdemo score E3 bugbait score Those are pretty significant differences, even with the GeForce card using the special FX drivers. Obviously, FX 5900 owners can turn down the resolution and other things to make the game play well, but that's probably not what they were thinking when they shelled out nearly $500 for a video card. GeForce FX owners can still hope that NVidia will pull some driver miracles out of their hat, but short of that, they may soon be wishing they had bought a Radeon. Doc's mini review: 5900 vs 9800 September 12th SCO Told "Nothing to Negotiate" After Darl McBride's open letter to the Open Source Community, several responses have been crafted. One if from Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens which basically states that there is nothing to negotiate with SCO (as suggested in McBride's open letter) because SCO refuses to show which lines of code supposedly infringe their intellectual property. Linus Torvalds agrees in his response to McBride's letter. Linus is quoted as saying, "Also, we find your references to a negotiating table somewhat confusing, since there doesn't seem to be anything to negotiate about. SCO has yet to show any infringing IP in the Open Source domain, but we wait with bated breath for when you will actually care to inform us about what you are blathering about." That just about sums it up nicely, don't you think? September 11th Grand Theft Auto: Deadly You all knew it was coming; some kids would kill somebody, and say "Vice City made me do it!" The inevitability was palpable. Two kids in Tennessee were bored one day, and grabbed a family .22 caliber rifle, and started shooting at cars. When they hit someone and killed him, and were caught, they explained that they wanted to play Vice City for real. The fact that the family members are trying to sue Take-Two Interactive, the makers of the game, but not the makers of the gun, is very telling about America. The bottom line is we are a very violence-oriented bunch that thinks guns are good fun. And we are willing to blame all gun deaths on anything but the ubiquitous availability of loaded weapons. A lot more people are going to die every year from gun shot wounds, but not one person will die from video games. But in the US, the game will be at fault, not the weapon. Major Spammer Gets Due A wonderful story over at Wired News details the downfall of a major spammer in court in the US. A lawyer for EMarketersAmerica.org filed a law suit against Spamhaus and SPEWS, two companies offering spam blacklist services. But before the case could make it to court, the spammers pulled out (voluntarily dismissed the case). But the spam blacklisters were having none of it, and are demanding that the case go to court. Failing that, they are demanding that EMarketersAmerica.org pay their $75,000 court fees. Schweeet! Here is an excerpt from EMarketersAmerica.org's web site: "On April 14, 2003, EMarketersAmerica.Org, Inc. filed suit against SPEWS, The Spamhaus Project, Joker.com, and the individuals that hide behind these organizations as they endeavor to destroy our right to market via the Internet. To date they've been much louder then our industry. United in their quest. Ruthless. Stopping at nothing---" They'll stop at nothing? Hooray! NVidia FX Cards Thrashed, Bashed, and Trashed As the long awaited Direct X 9 games Half Life2 and Doom III near release, there is much buzz about what kind of hardware will be needed to run them. If you have glanced over some of the scuttlebutt, you will probably have noticed that the news isn't good for NVidia. In fact, it's dismal. Benchmarks are showing that the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro delivers double the performance in Half Life 2 that the FX 5900 can muster. The basic problem seems to be that games need to be written (optimized) specifically for the FX cards, but that it's very hard to write such code. Indeed, as more people switch over to ATI cards, there will be very little reason for game makers to spend endless hours coding the game to run on inferior hardware. NVidia can turn this situation around if they decide they want to regain a leading position in the graphics market. But to do so they need to go back to the beginning, and get their hardware redesigned from the ground up, including much improved pixel shaders and the like. But ATI will be working hard to stay ahead, so it won't be easy for NVidia to surpass them. Back to the drawing board, as they say. NVidia has really been dissed by some game and benchmark developers recently (including Valve and their big deal with ATI, and Futuremark, the makers of 3D Mark). I suspect that the cold shoulder routine has something to do with NVidia not always playing nice. This rift will be increased when Valve releases what will probably be one of the definitive Direct X 9 benchmarks based on the Half Life 2 engine. NVidia will be made to look particularly bad by that benchmark. Maybe NVidia can dedicate some of those left-over Xbox engineers to improving the FX line of video cards. September 10th Hal... Stop the Car Please You'll be glad to know that researchers are working hard at figuring out how to make your car go the speed limit without your consent. I'm so glad I won't have to worry about the gas or the brake pedal soon. I can't wait. CRITICAL Windows Patch... again You have probably been itching to install another patch for Windows to prevent worms, viruses, and terrorists, so I'm glad to announce that Microsoft has come to the rescue. No need to deprive yourself of the warm-fuzzies, so head on over and get the patch. Enjoy. Bill Gates' Windows OS Hammered From All Sides At a time when Microsoft is trying to polish it's image as the world's premiere operating system developer, they are getting hammered by the IT press. You may have noticed a flood of Microsoft advertisements on TV, and heard about "studies" which show that Windows is more economical to deploy than Linux. Well, apparently the ploy isn't working too well. It's not just all the recent bug fixes that have been released for Windows, or the major worm and virus problems afflicting it recently, nor even the fact that some of the bug fixes seem to have bugs themselves. No, it's more that IT reporters are starting to turn ugly when it comes to Microsoft and their imperious leader, Bill. When the vast majority of stories coming out are about the lack of security, plethora of bugs, and high cost of Windows, you know that the corporate "message" isn't getting out. But there's more, including the fact that China, Japan and Korea are combining efforts to create an open-source Windows replacement. Bill could really help fight this anti-Windows trend by completely altering his personality, and becoming a human being... but that is the longest shot of all. September 9th New AMD Rating System Certain to Irk Mike Magee Mike Magee has nothing to do with this story, except for the fact that he really, really hates CPU rating systems. In fact, he probably hates them even more than that. So chances are he's really going to hate AMD's naming/numbering system for the Opteron. Heck, he's probably already written a wry, scathing, below-the-belt article about them, and I've blocked it from my conscious mind. So here you go: Single processor configurations: MTOPS stands for millions of theoretical operations per second, which in many ways is probably a fairly good yardstick to measure CPUs by. It certainly is better than MHz ratings. As you can see, the first number indicates the maximum number of CPUs per system, and the last number is like a speed rating (0 is slowest, 6 is fastest). What I can't figure out is what the middle number, "4", is for. Maybe it's just a placeholder. RIAA Begins Suing Customer Base; Song Sales Decline It's one of those rock and a hard place deals for the RIAA. They believe that their industry is in peril because of file downloading, and they think they need to do something drastic. But they also realize that the bad press they are getting isn't helping sell any music CDs. Almost makes you feel bad for them.... well, not really. Any business that expects to keep their customer base by threatening and suing them is just out of touch with reality. The Apple iTunes and other online music download services have shown that a lucrative market is just waiting to be exploited, but it isn't the business model that the RIAA wants to adopt. They want to force their overcharged customers to buy an entire CD, despite the fact that there may only be 2 or 3 good songs on the whole thing. How else are they going to get you to buy all those dogs? And since most "artists" now are just plain awful, there are going to be lots of songs on those CDs that nobody wants to download. Nor would they pay to download them if the service was offered. If you ask me, the RIAAs biggest problem is a lack of musical talent among the majority of the "artists" they represent. The RIAA will need to grow up, and realize that we aren't living in the vinyl record age any more. Get over it. September 8th SCO Making Money on Linux You've got to admit, SCO has found a unique way to make money on Linux... Extortion. They are threatening companies that use Linux with imaginary legal actions, thus driving some paranoid companies to pony up to SCO with Linux licensing fees. This is truly hysterical to me, that a company which couldn't sell it's own overpriced version of Linux has managed to scare companies into paying something like $700 per Linux computer for an operating system they had no hand in making. According to SCO, companies are paying up, and SCO has been forced to turn their entire sales staff over to Linux licenses (i.e., no one is buying any of their actual products). Any company dumb enough to pay the extortion money deserves what they get, which is precisely nothing. The company officials responsible for paying SCO the extortion money are going to have some explaining to do to share holders if SCO ends up losing in court, which is a near certainty. September 4th Six more Windows Security Patches (obviously a blatant attempt at a new Guinness World Record) Got patches? Well maybe you better go get them then. This reminds me of the new Windows 2003 Server commercials that Microsoft is running... you know; "we save a nickel!". At the end of the commercial, the "nickel" guy is sitting in front of the office crowd, and holds up an open manual and says... "automated system recovery!" They all cheer. What's so funny is that Microsoft would pick "system recovery" (i.e., that means your critical business server/infrastructure went down hard) as the cool feature to talk about. The "nickel" guy didn't say... "unprecedented uptimes!", now did he? Nor did he say... "the most secure server software on the planet!", did he? No, he said system recovery from crashes could be automated, suggesting that it happens often enough to need automating. Very telling if you ask me. September 2nd SCO Fined, and Headed for Extortion Indictment I think the Summer that SCO self-destructed will go down in history as one of the oddest chapters in IT history. And the story only gets odder and odder. A German court fined SCO 10,000 Euros for not changing their web site that accused Linux developers of copying Unix code, because SCO had not substantiated their claims. But more interesting is the fact that SCO has started sending invoices to commercial Linux users. The odd part about that is that if SCO loses in court, the attempt to invoice companies for products that SCO did not provide could open them up to charges of extortion. Why a company would do such a thing is the question, and my best guess is that both SCO and Microsoft realize that their 'Window' of opportunity to scare Linux-using companies away from the non-Microsoft OS is waning rapidly, so they want to milk it for all it's worth. I'm sure that Bill had hoped for more than just a few months of flimsy FUD for his millions of dollars in blood money. September 1st FilePlanet Foiled The game demo/patch download site, FilePlanet, has been foiled in their attempt to get exclusive rights to offer the new Call of Duty game demo for download. Several independent game download sites banded together and wrote an open letter to Activision opposing the exclusive FilePlanet deal. It worked... Activision backed down, and allowed other, free download sites post the demo. For those of you who haven't been sucked in yet, FilePlanet is a website associate with Gamespy, that offers game demo downloads. But since so many people are trying to download popular demos and patches at the same time, there is a big traffic jam. FilePlanet offers a better way for those with money. If you pay them $80 a year, you get instant access to game downloads, and faster download speeds. So the latest deal with Activision was obviously meant to drive more people to pay up to get the better download service. I still remember just a couple years ago, Jeremy Alford was running AGN3D, and he had all the latest demos and patches available for free. Oh how the internet is changing... free is fading fast. Copyright 2003, KickAss Gear |