Frontside buses vs Backside drug caches

Letters One reader, we think this could be President George W Bush himself, as it's written his trademark style, tells us:-

Re:
Click here for free World Cup highlight clips
Red card for Mac and Linux users on World Cup clips site
From: Robert C Richardson
To: John Leyden
Subject: fooken sooccer

Wtf you write a buncha shit about a boring ass dumbshit faggot game like
soccer for on a fooken IT site you ignorantass wanking cockmasters! Stick
with goddamn IT and leave that faggor eurotrash stupidass game in france or
italy or wherever all those soccer fags hang out.

Robert Richardson

There - you see? Florida. So may be it's Jeb, not George. In which case, apologies. But "Robert" has certainly taken the department's slogan to heart, don''t you think?

Re: Let's not hear it for silent PCs

Two more links to quiet PC resources from Paulo Ferreira in Porto, Portugal. target="new" SilentPC Review is a Slash-style board which looks very promising, and Silicon Acoustics is another quiet PC components vendor. Paulo adds that he still uses his silent MacPlus for terminal access.

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re: Sun to reprieve Solaris 9 for Intel?

To: John Lettice

You wrote:

"This clearly doesn't mean Solaris for Intel is out of the woods yet, of course. It seems inevitable that the bulk of the demand for the free DVD will have been for the Intel version (Solaris 8), and that this means that Sun can assume massive demand for 9 for Intel too. But this would be massive demand for Solaris 9 for Intel if it's free, and this is one of
the basic problems Sun had with Solaris for Intel in the first place. It doesn't matter greatly if you're not charging for the OS when you're selling the customer huge quantities of very expensive other stuff (Sparc version), but if you're just shipping OS CDs and/or offering free downloads to people who're not buying other stuff (Intel version), well,
what's the point?"

I think the point is that every copy of Solaris running on that IA-32 box is one less copy of Windows (or even Linux) - and ultimately, what's good for Solaris is good for Sun.

Anyone who can't/won't buy the SPARC hardware (and with the little SunBlade/Netra entry-level systems now affordable to mere mortals, price
becomes less of an issue) can at least run Solaris and get familiar with it, develop apps for it, or maintain a consistent deployment environment
for mixed shops (like ours) where we use some x86 stuff for development, QA, and light-duty assignments, but bigger mid-range SPARC iron for the heavy lifting (Oracle, and our production site).

Sun is in a tight spot with Linux and x86. Once you commoditize everything, what are you left with? Shit, we'd all have Yugos or Hyundais (albeit with the latest Intel bazillion RPM 2-stroke engines, to mix metaphors) in our driveways if the BMWs and Mercedes of the world didn't represent the higher end of performance and quality...

I think Sun realizes the benefits of tight integration of SPARC/Solaris (as Apple does with MacOSX/PowerPC), but the sur-reality of the marketplace is that the commodity crap is a fact you just can't ignore - so if you can't sell the box, at least get _your_ software on it instead of Chairman Bill's.

Elegance never wins with the masses - the herd instinct, slick marketing, and brute force keep the Wintel duopoly in power. Nobody cares about TCO - just low sticker prices. This throwaway consumer society is conditioned to just upgrade all the time when something "new" and shiny comes out - who's going to bother to actually engineer something lasting when product cycles are so absurdly short? Toss another hunk of cheap
beige crap on the pile and go with it - don't think hard - don't waste our time actually building something to last... and we wonder why the
dot-coms all imploded.

Mine didn't - funny thing, I run a 1.5 billion row database on two-year-old Sun/Cisco/NetApp gear and still have room for growth - some 50 million rows a month - while the IT budget has been _nil_ for the last six consecutive quarters... Five nines of uptime? Not a problem when you choose quality gear and do your engineering homework. But I digress.

Sigh.

Anyway, purists (some would say "zealots" :-) like me are an anachronism these days. I won't give in to Wintel, at least at home. Not an inch.
Not one thin dime of my money has ever, or will ever go to Micro$oft or into an Intel-powered beige box. And whenever possible, I put Solaris on
the x86 boxes I do have to manage at work... so I hope it survives.

Keep up the great work, guys.

-- Chris

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Re:

No cool ringtone, no style, says survey

Tim,

Funny article, loved the ending comment.

I had a co-worker (or should that be cow-orker) bust my chops for having my phone ring tone just the standard default ring and accused me of
being "not hip."

To which I replied "get a fucking life."

I think his mouth is still hanging open in surprise a week later.

Steve Chambers

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From the You-need-to-read-this-one-out-loud department:-

Re: Linux distros to unite

Andrew,

I think the new distro should be called dRedNot.

Patrick Kelly

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Re: Apple aims to boost bandwidth with 1.5GHz G4s

From: Jordan Winkelman

Andrew,

Not to be a bother but I just keep noticing in articles posted everywhere disparaging numbers when in relation to speeds of computers these days.  It seems that nobody actually knows what speeds chips are running at these days.  The marketing jerks have messed everything for people who actually want to know what there looking at.

Let’s take a close look some numbers here.  And yes I do believe that there has to be some kind of notification on the chip of a speed.  But all of the numbers these days are out of hand.

Let’s start with the Pentium 4 and it’s “400 MHz Front side bus.”  The “quad-pumped” bus that are, as I recall it 4 100-133 MHz 8-bit busses.  When Rambus was brought onto the scene this was a way of making it sound like there chips were faster, but when compared a 100-133 MHz bus at 32-bits you are looking at approximately the same amount of data give or take.  So bus speeds are more or less bunk on the Intel side of the pond.

AMD, I like there chips, is no better with the Athlon XP line that may be 1.53Ghz chip marked at 1900+.  What does that mean, I know the marketing bull, but what does it mean.

Next we get to Double Data Rate RAM.  This one really irks me.  Look at the names of these chips PC2100 PC2700, so on and so on.  These same chips are also called DDR 266, DDR 333, DDR 400.  The real fact of the matter is that Double Data Rate Ram can actually pump twice the amount of data through its main bus than its older SDRAM siblings.  What I mean here is that the bus is still running at 100MHz or 133MHz or even 166MHz, but these over inflated numbers are bull.

The average consumer doesn’t have the foggiest idea of what these numbers mean.  I have a computer science degree and have spent much of my life learning computers and I have a hard time with these numbers some times.

Here is another example.  The PowerPC series of chips actually completes two process’ for every cycle it computes.  You don’t here Motorola making claims that a 1GHz G4 is actually 2 GHz do you.

Sorry for the rant.  I am just a little annoyed with all the marketing bull these days.

Jordan Winkelman
Macentric Consulting

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Now no sooner had we mocked our Spokane reader for blaming the decline of Britain on improbable methods of ingesting Ecstacy, you write and tell us that such techniques not improbable at all.

The Reg,

A quick correction to the article 'How the British lost it - in 89 Words: Armed American frowns on E abuse'

I may not know much about drugs but my limited medical knowledge tells me that blood flows closet to the surface of the skin in the rectum. Therefore, although I'm sure it'd sting like hell because of the acidic properties of an MDMA tablet, sticking it up your arse is probably one of the more effective ways of getting those weird chemicals in to your blood stream.

More effective may be to grind the pill up and rub it in to your eyes. I'm sure that probably hurts too.

Maybe someone could enlighten us.

Yours sincerely,
Graham Redway

And enlightenment was soon forthcoming:-

From: Stieber, Oliver
To: Andrew Orlowski
Subject: Anyone sticking an ecstasy table up their back passage

Andrew,
I noticed a slight error in one of your more recent stores for The Register, "Anyone sticking an ecstasy table up their back passage - stop now. You're wasting your time, and your money?".

Sticking an ecstasy table up your back passage, is in fact the Most effective was of taking one, so far from wasting your time and money, you'll be having a better time, and spend less money, though it may take a little longer to have effect.

And Oliver helpfully points us here.

Now we have a request for one our celebrity readers, Mick Fleetwood, of Fleetwood Mac. Er, Mick - that story about Stevie Nicks, the roadie and the straw.... is it true? ®

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