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Readers' Letters Late and small

Basically what you lot think of us lot

[Okay, okay, so your Letters Ed went on a press freebie to Amsterdam and forgot all about Readers' Letters. Seeing as it's now Monday, what's gonna happen is that we'll post a shortened version of just what we say it is: readers' letters. Besides, there weren't many good ones this week anyway. All the troublemakers must be on holiday]

Here, by the way is:

Flame of the Week We are Intel lapdogs
Makes a change from being AMD/Rambus/etc lapdogs



Flame of the Week: Scruffy student replies
Everybody wants to study computing

For once I agree with a reply to an article. I am an ex "scruffy student" from " a computing course which took "people from any background" - in fact it was so easy to get on the course at the University of York - only had to get an A and 2 Bs at A level - oh and in the year I entered a B in A level Maths was required.

And my exciting placement abroad? Never happened - to make ends meet worked in a meat processing plant over the summer holidays.

The major draw back of studying Computer Science at the University of York (apart from the summer holidays?) - I was one of 7 females in a group of 70 - but hey at least it inspired me to study.
Thanks for making my hard work at Uni (image recognition, compliers, formal maths to name but a few look like one big piss up). Thanks for supporting everyone who has worked hard to get their degrees - oh and get to Uni in the first place.

As for the shed loads of money? Well like just about every student who has graduated - everyone I know who has studied at Uni has left with shed loads of debt. The difference is that those who earn less than £15000 (or there abouts) pa don't have to pay it back to the student loan company. Don't forget those overdrafts they have to be paid back within two years of graduating.

Rachel Breeze



[This stems from a big ole debate that Andrew accidentally stirred up by referring to stupid Canadians and seal clubbing. This letter appears to be genuine and was accompanied by some shots of seals pre and post-club. We decided not to post them]



Canadians finish off seal and turn on Reg
Microsoft suggests Canadians can't add

In your column, "Microsoft suggests Canadians can't add." You say you still haven't figured out why "Quebeckers" are banned. First, I should let you know it's spelled Quebecois. The reason it is not allowed in Quebec is due to Quebec Provincial Law, not Federal.

The seal hunt wasn't very good the last few years, mostly due to global warming. This has altered ice conditions in Canada. What ice remains in spring is so weak and thin is breaking up and killing the seals without any help from Canadian east coast sealers. Seals are being crushed to death. Too much warming caused by cars, trucks, coal burning etc. Say, doesn't England burn a lot of coal? If you want a debate on which country, Canada or England, has caused the most devastation on earth, let me know.

Have you heard the news? Canada is preparing for a new hunt. Yes indeed, we are planning an invasion of English soil using thousands specially designed canoes made from left over seal skins. We still have a bit of work to do before the invasion begins, things like, teaching our navy seals not to come in contact with English blood as reports indicate many people may be infected with mad cow disease. According to the reports from European and North American scientists and media, many English people are or soon will be suffering from insanity due to eating the flesh of mad cows. So, as the loyal allies we are, we just couldn't allow ourselves to let so many of you suffer from the obvious delusions that are so evident now to us and your European allies.

Oh, I should also mention that instead of clubs, we'll be using hockey sticks to put you poor English subjects out of your bleak existence.

Be strong, help will be there if there is any ice in the North Atlantic this winter. And we promise that the hockey sticks won't hurt, well ok, maybe just a little.



Intel behind Big Brother site claim

Just a little story

A few months back I crashed a party at the offices of a Brighton firm that shares a building with Victoria Real. What little I remember of a pretty drunken night was repeatedly blighted by the looming apparition of a friendless, gormless, drug-addled Victoria Real employee latching on to me and telling me in no-uncertain terms how important their firm was going to be in the world of e-commerce blah-di-blah and how someone-or-other in the E-world had feted them for future greatness.

Being obviously very excited by this non-sensical rant I smiled politely and tried my hardest to elbow myself away from him and towards the rapidly depleting bar. However in my rush I singularly failed to point out to him that just because they "do websites", have a naff, Gibsonesque moniker and trendy office space it doesn't entitle them to stamp their brand loyalty all over my head when I was trying against all the odds to enjoy myself at an office party.

Your article brought this memory shuddering to the surface, I hope you're happy. At least now I'm properly enlightened as to who did the BB website and I completely understand how such a surefire idea could be so well and truly loused up.

Yrs,
B



We all still want Bluetooth

Yes, we're still waiting for Bluetooth.

We've waited for 30 years for thin displays, for networking to the home, for wireless telephones that truly anyone can afford and for good GUIs to UNIX. We've waited for millions of years for heated, lighted, comfortable, safe homes. So what?

We can wait another breath or two for Bluetooth. Damn all the friggin' wires!

Gene Mosher



The royal family's email fraud
We were wrong: sign up to the Nigerian 'fraud' email now

I received the same email some months back, I have a best friend and fellow CF developer who is Nigerian. She felt I was being unfair laughing at the email and made me reply so I did! :-(

I was invited the Park Lane Hilton, where I met 10 Nigerian business men, very smooth and professional full documents to prove they were who they said they were. My friend however was able to find out before we arrived that no such a position in the Nigerian government existed, so had some fun with them getting them to prove it ;-)

I was then given the hard sell, its very hard not to laugh ;-)

I left ... however the plan was less they wanted your money, more they wanted to use "UK" people with good backgrounds to move a lot of illegal money around.

Not good ... safe to say I declined.

If you add this as a follow up ... please do NOT add my name! ;-)



I don't think Rambus detractors have ever said that Rambus couldn't achieve higher bandwidth on a per pin basis. However, bandwidth isn't everything despite what Intel and Rambus want you to think, and large numbers of pins are a lot cheaper thanks to flip-chip/C4 technology and and improvements in multi-layer motherboard manufacturing.



Memory latency, memory die size, memory package density, motherboard design, testing costs, etc must be taken into consideration when you tally up the true performance and financial costs/benefits of a design.

I should hope the Pentium 4 with a 4-8x higher bandwidth system bus can achieve high memory bandwidths with what is probably going to be an expensive dual Rambus channel motherboard/chipset combo. But I would expect a 128 bit DDR motherboard/chipset to perform similarly, while reducing latency and system cost.

In future I expect that chipsets and processors which support a multilevel memory hierarchy using onboard embedded RAM will further enhance bandwidth and lower latency while lowering overall costs, though it may require smarter and better thought out chips and OSes to take full advantage of such an architecture.

Anil Maliyekkel



[Oh dear, oh dear. This is printed as was received because we didn't want to enter his world]



All Filth, Lies, Filth filth filth filth!!!! Rambus makes the fastest memory, hands down! There is no latency as Tom Pabst put it - it has been inspected and proved a falsehood. Intel is just a company that is protecting themselves from the carnivore called AMD. BTW - what is the fastest chipset? Hmmmm! I think it is the i840! *BOTH RAMBUS AND INTEL*

Lets see - why does Tom Pabst hate intel "Because of their aggressive tactics* - well, wouldn't you have agressive tactics if you had to defend your patents against companies trying to cut corners? No, there is no excuse for people like you cutting down a great company! BTW - my dog wrote this! Actually I'm not insane, you are just making me go insane with all these crazy lies! Go collect your AMD paycheck and retire you FEEEEEELTHY ANIMAL!!!!! YOU DOOOOOOOOGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!! BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! SLAP SLAP! TAKE THAT!!! WAM!!! AND THAT!!!
SLAP BAM!!!! /me slaps j00!!!

Filth



Egroups under fire for child porn pics

It's good to have someone speaking out for what so many of us feel. So many of us have sent letters to Egroups, Yahoo, and the police but it is nice to see somebody with a little more stature speaking on behalf of the children as well.

I know that child pornography has been around for a very long time and it most likely always will be. But I feel that it is up to all of us to make it as difficult as possible for the sick and deranged people that view it... and even worse, the people that force the children to do such adult acts. There are other child porn sites on Egroups already. They contain the same links to the Lolita sites.

I know that it would be difficult for Egroups, and other such servers, to monitor everything that is posted on their sites. But why wouldn't it be possible for them to set up some key words (ie: girls age 4-10, child pornography etc) that would send an alert to Egroups so they can investigate and shut it down if need be? I'm no computer genius, but it just doesn't seem that it's that much to ask or would be that hard to do. Thank you again for your article.

Sincerely,
Corinna Hersey
mother of 3 and Egroups member



[And eGroups perspective]



I just read your two articles on eGroups and child porn. I will get the appropriate person to officially respond asap. However, I'd like to make it clear that we are intensely opposed to child porn (both morally and legally), and remove it from our service as soon as we discover it. Note that I (and others at eGroups/Yahoo) have children myself and feel very strong about this issue.

To report abuse on our service, simply send email to abuse@egroups.com and report the illegal content. We will get on it quickly.

Note that we cannot possibly monitor our service for a variety of reasons (e.g. 100's millions of messages per day) and are dependent on individuals, like your readers, to contact us as soon as they find offensive content. We will then gladly delete it.

Rikk Carey (Senior VP Product Development)



[And finally, some reader humour bypass]



Subject: Gah

It's spelled 'Hertz', you fuel, not 'hurtz'.

Thus 'megahertz'.

kira.

Mike replies: "And you think I don't know that?"

Kira replies:

It's just *really* pissing me off, that's all. Could someone explain the joke please?

Mike replies: "Why does it annoy you so much? It's just one of our puns - hurts, hertz. Our stories are full of em."

Kira replies:

Usually they're *funny*.

I'm surrounded by quasi-illiterate morons who see this sort of thing and think that it is *correct*, too - that's probably something to do with it... I'm just a bit of a spelling nazi, ignore me...

kira.



If you enjoyed these letters then why not curl up and have a good read of some more of our correspondence here.

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