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Quizzical

So you question us, eh? Oh, and this is where the techy stuff is

Reg exposes Amazon's poor security
Amazon leaves authors open to abuse

Guys, there is nothing new here. What is it that you think you're revealing incredible news that you can pose as an author on Amazon? Of course you can, as you have been able to since the beginning. Amazon has no way to keep track of the thousands of authors in their database, so it's open. They give each comment a quick reading to make sure it sounds authentic, and then posts it.

Doesn't everyone know this? I've known for years that anyone could click the "I'm the author" link, but I thought that people have enough commonsense and respect to not do it. Instead of reporting this well-known lax security, how about a solution to the problem?



Good for your mate, sticking up for his brother like that. I mean it can't possibly have been an excuse to try and widen the knowledge of his brother's actual existence to the reading public. Sad to say I have never heard of Nick Blincoe. Or at least I hadn't !



Nah, this just has to be a genuine story and definitely not a rather feeble attempt to push the book sales of one's very own sibling.

Keep up the good work guys (lol). Any more of you have relatives who are trying to flog something ?

Alxjohnson

[We are disgusted by the accusations of nepotism - if however you do want to purchase a copy of just one of Rob's brother's book, you need only click here.



50p auction bid buys a lot of PR

Just a quick note of thanks to Team register for posting the story about the woman who won a holiday for 50 pence.

Thanks to your story, I managed to bid for and get a late deal to Malta for two weeks, saving over 1,300 quid in the process.

Of course while I'm sunning myself on the beach next week, I'll be sure to think of you all in the office. you never know, you might even get a post card.

Thanks
Simon



Intel engineers AMD's success, Dham it

When Vinod Dham left AMD, the engineers had a going away party - after he left. The NX686's core design idea was basically sound, but there were serious interface problems (not just the bus, which we rebuilt from scratch) which Vin REFUSED to allow to be fixed until customers told us "fix them". Vin's goal at AMD was to pump our stock & leave--most of us considered his options, whatever they were, worth it to get rid of him. He is the one who is hard to get along with.

Yes, we needed a design that was near silicon, and NexGen had one. But Vin refused to allow the lessons learned in the K5 to be brought to bear on the NX686, as that might have slowed down his options.

So now we read that Vin has gotten yet another startup bought out by some sucker. Prediction: Vin will be out at the next major stock high of this new company after six months.

As for Atiq, who was president of NexGen, we did not hire him, per se, he was clearly being tested as Jerry's successor. But then he began to advance the ludicrous position that we sell the Dresden Fab. Excuse me? Frankly, the proposition was so bad that I and others concluded that it had to have been made up to cover another issue--Atiq decided he wanted out, and this (a clear strategic difference with Sanders) was the way he & Sanders decided to make it happen.

Atiq was a great CTO, and we had a lot of hopes for him to take over after Jerry.

As for "filling out forms in triplicate", I can't buy that. It wasn't starting while I was there, and Vin had been gone for years, with Atiq gone as well. If such a change is starting, I would look to more recent influences from Apple & IBM.



Sun helps AMD to Hammer Intel

I've added a few comments to my original e-mail in response to your comment below. I hope I'm not writing too much.

FreeBSD Unix would benefit greatly from the increased speed and scalability to encrypt and decrypt through one of the best and bugless (least bells and whistles) firewalls available. The added speed will benefit greatly. If I remember correctly, Microsoft, until recently was using FreeBSD Unix for their mail servers. The 64-bit data and instruction space will increase the scalability of the platform, and reduce the no. of servers needed in mail clusters or database clusters or any clusters for that matter. How beneficial will the TFP instrucions be to the Internet's streaming media servers and clusters?
The FreeBSD and Linux communities have made use of all the instruction sets available including SSE and 3DNow instructions; it would be inconcievable that the developers would not take advantage of the added instructions, where they could benefit, to make their product more scalable and competitive to Solaris, AIX and Microsoft.

Personally, I would expect to see Red Hat's development platform come out with a toolset to support x86-64 to include in their distribution (Oracle's database loves 64-bit), but I wouldn't hold my breath due to their relationship with Intel and Dell. I think Red Hat will support Intel's added SSE2 instructions due to the financial help from Intel, but I think they will also be platform agnostic, and utilize all instructions available to become more competitive.

Oracle runs better on Red Hat than any other Linux distribution, and I would expect Red Hat to jump at the opportunity to support the 64-bit data space just to support a more scalable Linux/Oracle to compete with Solaris-64/Oracle and Windows 2000-64/SQL 2000. Additionally, with the hearty support of Sun, Red Hat would be negligent if they didn't provide a competitive product that takes advantage of the most competitive and ubiquitous (and inexpensive) server platform (x86) in the world.

The platform may be ubiquitous and inexpensive, but it still leaves plenty of markets upstream to conquer as the platform strengthens. Some of these markets that would be good candidates for price competition could be SANs that would make great use of a 64-bit data space and the added competitiveness of the x86-64 platform as it incorporates some of the newest technologies like Infiniband and Firewire. Other markets like media clusters could take advantage of available inexpensive (relatively) standard hardware to provide improved gross margin from the lower cost, high volume x86-64 platform for the internet to move towards multimedia presentations instead of the now more common written page and occasional video clip.

Not only will the Hammer ship with the addition of it's 64-bitness and TFP instructions, but Infiniband (which is due sometime soon after the Hammer ships) will add substantial scalability to the x86 platform in general, and add a higher degree of clustering with added bandwidth, manageability and scalability along with stronger interoperability with routers and high-end switches from Cisco and others. Already AMD is building a great relationship with Cisco and Nortel as evidenced by both companies giving AMD their best supplier of the year awards.

AMD has a broad portfolio of products to compete with Intel without being considered an uncomfortably close competitor in the Internet space.

AMD's financials have come a long way, and I would expect that they would (as they have in the past) increasingly support the open source development community as they possily can. AMD is already on record saying that they have added announcements in the upcoming Linux conference.

I'd like to continue writing, but I'm hittin the road, and I'll be travelling without a computer (thankfully) for the next week to 10 days. It's always a pleasure to read the yourself and The Register - I love the prodding that you give Intel and AMD (and everyone else for that matter).

Sincerely,
al aguinaldo
aguinaldo@engineer.com
New York
-----Original Message-----
From: Al Aguinaldo
To: mike.magee@theregister.co.uk
Subject: Hammer comments - hope you find them helpful

Hi Mike,

I wrote some comments in reply to an article on ZDNet. The following comments aren't exactly as I had written them in reply to the following story:

What can you run on a 'Hammer'? but they're very close.

I'm sure this is all old news to you, but maybe it'll re-open some of your own ideas.

AMD and it's leader, Jerry Sanders, are great at creating and promoting partnerships -- just ask DEC's Palmer and Motorola's Hector Ruiz (or should I say AMD's Palmer and Ruiz). You don't need formal announcements to know that Sun, Microsoft and the Linux Community will heartily support AMD's 64-bit Hammer - Sun is already praising AMD's ISV support.

Sun Microsystems and it's Solaris OS is the leading marketing vendor of important costly servers and operating systems such as firewalls like Checkpoint Firewall-1 and other backoffice functions. I know if I were to enter the Internet Server market, Sun would be numero uno on my list.

You can bet your bottom dollar that Microsoft will support 64-bit instrucions too that will greatly benefit Microsoft's OS and database - I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle announced support soon - high-end databases love 64-bit addressing space.

I can't even imagine the Linux and FreeBSD communities not jumpin' at the opportunity to add more performance and an increased ability to compete in the CAD, scientific workstations and gaming markets. The benefits are considerable. Along with a flat 64-bit addressing space, the Hammer will have much higher floating-point performance from the technical floating point (TFP) instructions without trying to re-invent the heel on the Intel Itanic.

al aguinaldo
aguinaldo@engineer.com



[And finally a bad taste joke from Dave]



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