intel

Abandoned intellectual property

Dave Farquhar Copyright , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Abandoned Intellectual Property. I read a piece on this subject at OSOpinion over the weekend, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. There are, of course, a lot of people calling for abolition of copyright or radical changes. This is, believe it or not, one of the tamer proposals I’ve read.

I’m definitely of two minds on this one. Take my first ever publication for money, in 1991. Compute Magazine, before Bob Guccione had managed to totally ram it into the ground, opted to buy my spring break project I collaborated on with a friend. We were writing a video game for the Commodore 64 and 128 and we were getting tired of trying to draw the title screen manually with graphics commands (bad enough on the 128 which had Basic commands to do such things, but on the 64 you were talking peeks and pokes all over the place–someone really should have written this thing back in 1982!) so we wrote a program to do the work for us. You loaded the sprites, moved ’em around, hit a key, and it gave you the Basic code to re-create the screen, suitable for inclusion in your program. We never finished the game, but we got a cool $350 and international recognition (OK, so it was a dwindling audience, but how many high school kids can say they’re published authors at age 16?).

Now, the problem. General Media whittled Compute down until it was basically just another PC mag, abandoning the multiplatform support that made it so great (I read about my beloved Commie 8-bits but still got the opportunity to learn about Macs, Amigas and PCs–what could be better?), market share continued to dwindle, and eventually Guccione and GM sold out to Ziff-Davis, who fulfilled your subscription with a choice of mags (I remember I opted for PC/Computing). So the copyright went to Ziff-Davis, who never did anything with the old Compute stuff. A few years later, Ziff-Davis fell on hard times and eventually hacked itself up into multiple pieces. Who owns the old Compute stuff now? I have no idea. The copyrights are still valid and enforcable. I seriously doubt if anyone cares anymore whether you have the Nov. 1991 issue of Compute if you’re running MOB Mover on your 64/128 or emulator, but where do you go for permission?

The same goes for a lot of old software. Sure, it’s obsolete but it’s useful to someone. A 68020-based Mac would be useful to someone if they could get software for it. But unless the original owner still has his/her copies of WriteNow, Aldus SuperPaint and Aldus Persuasion (just to name a few desirable but no-longer-marketable abandoned titles) to give you, you’re out of luck. Maybe you can get lucky and find some 1995 era software to run on it, but it’ll still be a dog of a computer.

But do we have an unalienable right to abandoned intellectual property, free of charge? Sure, I want the recordings Ric Ocasek made with his bands before The Cars. A lot of people want to get their hands on that stuff, but Ocasek’s not comfortable with that work. Having published some things that I regret, I can sympathize with the guy. I like how copyright law condemns that stuff to obscurity for a time. (Hopefully it’d be obscure in the public domain too because it’s not very good, but limiting the number of copies that can exist clinches it.)

Obscurity doesn’t mean no one is exploited by stealing it. I can’t put it any better than Jerry Pournelle did.

I don’t like my inability to walk into record stores and buy Seven Red Seven’s Shelter or Pale Divine‘s Straight to Goodbye or The Caulfields’ Whirligig, but I couldn’t easily buy them in 1991 when they were still in print either. But things like that aren’t impossible to obtain: That’s what eBay and Half.com are for.

For the majority of the United States’ existence, copyright law was 26 years, renewable for another 26. This seems to me a reasonable compromise. Those who produce content can still make a living, and if it’s no longer commercially viable 26 years later, it’s freely available. If it’s still viable, the author gets another 26-year-ride. And Congress could sweeten the deal by offering tax write-offs for the premature release of copyrighted material into the public domain, which would offer a neat solution to the “But by 2019, nobody would want WriteNow anymore!” problem. Reverting to this older, simpler law also solves the “work for hire” problem that exploits musicians and some authors.

All around, this scenario is certainly more desirable for a greater number of people than the present one.

From: Bruce Edwards

Dear Dave:

I am having a crazy computer problem which I am hoping you or your readers may be able to give me a clue to.  I do have this posted on my daily journal, but since I get very little traffic, I thought your readership or
yourself may be able to help.  Here’s the problem:

My wife’s computer suddenly and inexplicably became very slow when accessing web sites and usually when accessing her e-mail.  We access the internet normally through the LAN I installed at home.  This goes to a Wingate machine which is connected to the aDSL line allowing shared access to the internet.

My computer still sends and receives e-mail and accesses the web at full speed.  Alice’s computer now appears to access the web text at about the speed of a 9600 baud modem with graphics coming down even more slowly if at
all.  Also, her e-mail (Outlook Express) usually times out when going through the LAN to the Wingate machine and then out over the internet.  The LAN is working since she is making a connection out that way.

File transfer via the LAN between my PC and hers goes at full speed. Something is causing her internet access to slow to a crawl while mine is unaffected.  Also, it appears to be only part of her internet access.  I can
telnet out from her computer and connect to external servers very fast, as fast as always.  I know telnet is just simple text, but the connection to the server is very rapid too while connecting to a server via an http
browser is much much slower and then, once connected, the data flows so slow it’s crazy.

Also, dial-up and connect to the internet via AOL and then use her mail client and (external to AOL) browser works fine and is as speedy as you would expect for a 56K modem.  What gives?

I tried reinstalling windows over the existing set-up (did not do anything) and finally started over from “bare metal” as some like to say.  Reformat the C drive.  Reinstall Windows 98, reinstall all the drivers, apps, tweak the configuration, get it all working correctly.  Guess what?  Same slow speed via the aDSL LAN connection even though my computer zips out via the
same connection.  Any suggestions?

Sincerely,

Bruce W. Edwards

~~~~~~~~~~

Hi Bruce,

The best thing I can think of is your MTU setting–have you run any of those MTU optimization programs? Those can have precisely the effect you describe at times. Try setting yor MTU back to 1500 and see what that does. While I wholeheartedly recommend them for dialup connections, MTU tweaking and any sort of LAN definitely don’t mix–to the point that I almost regret even mentioning the things in Optimizing Windows.

Short of that, I’d suggest ripping out all of your networking protocols and adapters from the Network control panel and add back in TCP/IP and only the other things you absolutely need. This’ll keep Windows from getting confused and trying to use the wrong transport, and eliminate the corrupted TCP/IP possibility. These are remote, but possible. Though your reinstall should have eliminated that possibility…

If it’s neither of those things, I’d start to suspect hardware. Make sure you don’t have an interrupt conflict (rare these days, but I just saw one a couple weeks ago so I don’t rule them out). Also try swapping in a different cable or NIC in your wife’s machine. Cables of course go bad more frequently than NICs, though I’ve had horrible luck with cheap NICs. At this point I won’t buy any ethernet NIC other than a Bay Netgear, 3Com or Intel.

I hope that helps. Let me know how it goes for you.

Hardware mailbag for Sunday

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

I wrote up some stuff, forgot to upload it, and lost it. I hate when that happens. So I’ll hit the mailbag for this late Sunday post.
From: Robert Bruce Thompson

Good post on AMD/Intel. At this point, the only thing saving Intel is the fact that AMD doesn’t have enough fab to keep up with demand.

—-

Thanks.

I know AMD and IBM have an agreement dating back to their K6 woes, and I really don’t know why AMD doesn’t have IBM manufacture Athlons and/or Durons to supplement their own capacity. There are issues with someone else making your chips like higher ramp-up time and possibly lower yields, and of course lower profits but I have to think the greater market share they’d gain until they can get another fab built would have to make it worthwhile.

I really wonder if the thing standing in the way of that isn’t technical, but rather Jerry Sanders’ “real men have fabs” attitude.

From: Robert Bruce Thompson

Well, perhaps. But his attitude is correct. Consider CPUs. Intel (bunch of fabs) = dominant; AMD (a couple fabs) = far second; everyone else (no fabs) = non-players. Same thing in chipsets. Intel (bunch of fabs) = dominant; VIA (a fab) = far second; SiS, ALi, etc. (no fabs) = non-players. But I agree that AMD should sub out CPUs to IBM, who can make chips with the best of ’em.

—-

But I wonder if that attitude towards fabs is what’s keeping Sanders and AMD from subcontracting; it seems almost as if using someone else would appear as an admission of weakness and he’s not willing to do it. That’s an Intel-like mistake. When opportunity comes, you have to seize it regardless of how it looks short-term.

From: J.H. Ricketson

Subject: More bargains

Dave –

Another link for surplus/overstock bargains:

www.computersurplusoutlet.com

O have placed one order with them. Completely satisfied, start to finish. Outpost couldn’t have done better. Also, they are in Nevada, which saves me, a Californican, the 8.5% local shopping penalty. They have a good selection of stuff at very good prices.

Regards,

JHR
—
J. H. RICKETSON
[JHR@WarlockLltd.com]

—-

Thanks.

AMD’s turnaround

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

AMD just turned their fourth consecutive profitable quarter, and they say they expect to sell out of Athlons this year. This exposes AMD’s prime weakness: Even though this year Intel has repeatedly failed to execute while AMD has had smooth sailing, Intel has the tremendous advantage of capacity. AMD has two fabs. I don’t remember how many Intel has. Eight?
I was talking with someone before church Wednesday night about new PCs, and he said, “I hear AMD is actually outperforming Intel these days.” AMD, of course, has always been known as the budget chip maker. In 1992, if you wanted a bargain PC, you got an AMD 386DX/40. In the mid 1990s, for a bargain you bought AMD 486s. In the late 90s, you bought AMD K6s. Suddenly, AMD’s not doing much in the low end. They’ve stopped taking orders on K6-2s and they’ll ship their final one this month. The Duron’s a great chip, but they’re not making them in huge quantities. They cite lack of an inexpensive integrated chipset, which is a perfectly valid reason, but there’s another reason. Why should they produce large numbers of Durons? They’re selling every Athlon they can make, so why sacrifice high-margin chips to make lower-margin chips?

It’s been a very interesting year. AMD bet the company on its new fab, knowing that if they made one mistake there was every possibility they were toast. Going into 2000, Intel looked like a company that could do no wrong. But Intel made tons of mistakes this year (the i810 and 1.13 GHz PIII recalls, other high-speed chips that you could read about but not buy, the lack of a suitable replacement for the venerable 440BX chipset, delays on the P4), having a year that made some of AMD’s bad years look good or at least acceptable. Meanwhile, AMD executed. Unlike some, I was fairly confident that AMD would find some way to survive, but survival was about all I expected from them, and about all anyone had any right to expect, given their track record and financial condition.

The guy at church asked if he should sell his Intel stock and get some AMD. I told him I didn’t think so. If AMD can turn around, so can Intel. As for whether AMD is a good investment, I don’t know. They’d look a whole lot better to me if they had a couple more fabs. They’re doing great on CPUs and flash memory, but they need enough capacity to be able to afford to flood the market with Durons, and they need enough capacity to be able to manufacture chipsets if they so choose, rather than developing chipsets as stopgap solutions until VIA and SiS and ALi can step in and then phasing them out. Intel learned that building both chipsets and CPUs allows you to, to a great degree, control your own destiny, not to mention make an extra $20-$30 per computer sold. Intel’s mistake was guessing incorrectly (or perhaps not caring) what consumers wanted, betting on Rambus, and then delivering a bunch of technologies that it was quickly forced to recall.

I don’t know that AMD can turn itself into a giant like Intel, but a strong AMD is good for all of us. It keeps Intel honest.

Hardware developments

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Hardware news. Lots of stuff today. We’ll take it one at a time.
AMD to hit 1.5 GHz by January. Intel intends to release a 1.5 GHz P4 in late November/early December. AMD’s a bit behind that (assuming Intel will deliver, which they’ve been having difficulty doing lately), but the 1 GHz Athlon performs similarly to a 1.4 GHz P4. Good news for us, bad news for Intel. AMD intends to release a 1.2 GHz Athlon within a month, along with an 800 MHz Duron.

In related news, the AMD 760 chipset (the SMP-enabled one) will be released this year.

The P4 problems are related to the use of PCI graphics cards and Intel has reportedly fixed the problem. Although allowing much higher clock rates, the P4 is less efficient than the P3, so a 1.4 GHz P4 is expected to give comparable performance to a 1 GHz P3. It won’t be until Intel hits 1.5 GHz and higher that the new architecture will give any performance advantage over what’s available now. Not that you can find a 1 GHz P3…

Memory prices are down. If you’re looking to buy, this is a good time. You never know when they’ll rise again, or fall for that matter.

Maxtor buys Quantum. In a consolidation of disk manufacturers, Maxtor bought the disk manufacturing wing of Quantum for $2 billion, making Maxtor the world’s biggest disk manufacturer. Quantum’s tape operations will be spun off into a new company, to be named Quantum.

Sounds cards, hard drives, and initial dual G4 impressions

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , ,

The underwhelming dual G4. I had a conversation Tuesday with someone who was thinking about ditching his PII to get a dual G4 because he thought it would be faster. I guess he thought if he got VirtualPC or SoftWindows, a dual G4/500 would run like a dual PIII/500 or something, plus give him access to all the Mac software. Nice try.
I’m sure one of these dual G4s would make an outstanding Linux box, but the loss of binary compatibility with all the x86 software is something. Sure you can recompile, but there are those instances where that isn’t an option. And under Mac OS 9, that second CPU sits idle most of the time. Photoshop and a couple of other apps use it, but the OS doesn’t–certainly not to the extent that Windows NT or a Unix variant will use a second CPU.

I’m also very disappointed with the hardware. The dual G4 I’m setting up right now has a 124-watt power supply in it. Yes, 124 watts! Now, the PPC chips use less power than an Intel or AMD CPU, and the G4 uses a microATX-like architecture, but they know full well that graphics professionals are going to buy these things and stick four internal hard drives, a Zip, a DVD-RAM, and a gigabyte of RAM inside. Do that, and you don’t have much punch left to power such “non-essentials” as the video card, extra disk controller, and CPUs… This will cause problems down the line. It would seem they’re paying for the extra CPU without increasing the price dramatically by cutting corners elsewhere.

The G4 remains an excellent example of marketing. IBM could invent sushi, but they’d market it as raw, dead fish (which is why they’ve become a non-contender in the PC arena that they created, with the possible exception of the ThinkPad line) while Apple continues to sell sand in the desert. Remarkable.

AMD pricing. The Duron-600 is a great buy right now; according to Sharky Extreme’s CPU pricing, it’s as low as $51. My motherboard vendor of choice, mwave.com, has the Duron-600 with a Gigabyte 7ZX-1 and fan for $191. Outstanding deal. I’d get a PC Power and Cooling fan for it to replace whatever cheapie they’re bundling.

I prefer Asus motherboards to everything else, but the performance difference between the Gigabyte and Asus offerings is really close (Asus wins some benchmarks by a hair, Gigabyte wins others, with Asus being a bit better overall but we’re talking differences of under 1-4 percent, barely noticeable). The Gigabyte boards cost about $30 less than the Asus. I’m thinking if I were getting a Duron for a value system, I’d go Gigabyte; if I were looking for a Thunderbird-based performance system, I’d go Asus.

I plan to see how Naturally Speaking fares on my Celeron; if it’s not quick enough for me I’ll probably retire my trusty K6-2/350 and replace the board with a Duron or Thunderbird.

Voice recognition. I got my Andrea ANC-600 mic on Monday. Since Naturally Speaking and the SB Live! card hadn’t even shipped yet, I went ahead and put the ANC-600 on my Celeron-400 (still equipped with an ESS sound card) and fired up ViaVoice. The ANC-600 eliminated the background noise and increased accuracy noticeably. ViaVoice still tended to mess up a word per sentence, but at least it was in the neighborhood (it had real problems with past/present tense) and its speed was a little better, though it still tended to drag behind me. The SB Live! should help that; as should the newer software’s reliance on newer processor architecture (ViaVoice 97 was designed with the Pentium-MMX in mind, rather than the PII/Celeron or something newer). I await Naturally Speaking’s arrival with much, much greater confidence now.

———-
From: Dan Bowman

Maxtor HDDs

And the CompUSA down the street always has a good deal on them…

This week, Office Depot is selling Maxtor 15gig drives for $99. That’s a “Warlock’s Mirror” for a little over $200 with tax.

dan

———-

Thanks.

Overclocking Pentium-75s

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Retro Computing , , ,

I had an overclocking conversation at work today. A coworker wanting to overclock a laptop. I told him I didn’t think that was a good idea. Then this was waiting for me at home:

From: Curtis Horn
Subject: Pentium-75

Hello, I’m one of your readers and I check your view for the tips you sometimes put up. I’m working on a compaq pentium 75 also and maybe you can do what I did. Overclock the chip to 90Mhz. the way I did this is by changing the bus speed to 60Mhz, from 50. this has speed it up significantly I think because the memory is also speed up. You’ll also get a laugh out of this, it’s a Compaq 972 and it has 8MB of memory — ON the Mother board!! I could not believe it. but it’s there. Luckily this leaves 4 simm slots open, so i can add 4 8MB SIMMs. (16MB SIMMs are way to expensive and I have some 8MB laying around and can buy some more for 10$ each) I convinced the person to buy a 5Gig quantum drive, so they have something they can use when they upgrade. Well hope the P75 you’re working on OCs as easily as the one I have here.

Curtis

http://homes.arealcity.com/cis/

Compaq used to put a fair bit of memory on the motherboard itself. My Presario 660 (a 486/66) has 4 MB on the board. There are a couple of Compaqs from the 900 series still floating around at work that have 8 MB on the motherboard as well. But it’s not a common practice anymore, and I don’t recall any other manufacturer who did that regularly–I remember Compaq doing it because I used to sell Compaqs by the truckload and frequently I ended up adding upgrades to them.

Bus speed isn’t nearly as important in the Pentium Pro/II/III/Celeron and AMD Athlon arena, but in Socket 7 and earlier, you’re right, it makes a huge difference. Remember, the bus speed determines the speed at which the CPU can access the memory and the cache, and as the Mendocino Celeron illustrated, cache speed is more important than CPU speed or cache size. In the early days of Tom’s Hardware Guide, Tom Pabst revealed that a Pentium-150 running at 75 MHzx2 outran a Pentium-166, and a Pentium-166 running at 83MHzx2 outran a P200. So what was the point of buying a P200 if you weren’t going to overclock it, right? Ah, the good old days…. This, of course, was one reason Intel decided to start locking CPU multipliers.

The speed of the PCI bus was also tied to the bus speed. A good Pentium-100 could outrun a Pentium-120 because the Pentium-100 had a full 33 MHz PCI bus while the Pentium 120’s PCI bus ran at 30 MHz. The Pentium 75’s PCI bus ran at a pokey 25 MHz. Nobody wants to slow down their video and disk performance by 10 percent, let alone 25 percent.

Overclocking P75s is risky business though. Intel never intended to make a P75. The problem was, they had terrible yields initially on their P90s, but they found a good percentage of the bad chips would run reliably at 75, so they created the P75 and phased out the P60 and P66. (The P66 was actually a better performer because of the bus speed.) The P75 sold like crazy, and Intel wasn’t going to can a best-seller, so once they got over the yield problems, they still marketed P75s. I’ve heard of people going as high as 133 MHz with P75s. I experimented once with a P75 and took it as high as 120 MHz, but couldn’t get 133 (I suspect people getting to that level may have been increasing the voltage). It didn’t run reliably at 120 MHz for long, though I know of people who swear up and down they got 75’s running at that speed reliably with no special tricks.

Overclocking an old chip like that is fine, as long as you’re aware of the risks and willing to live with them. I’d definitely put a heavy-duty CPU fan on it (like a PC Power and Cooling fan for a high-end K6-2). In my case, I’m more interested in having a PC that’s as reliable as possible. Her life’s plenty complicated enough without having and overclocked P75 to deal with.

And we now have better ways to measure overclocking’s effects. Microsoft doesn’t have a dog in this fight but they see the weirdness.

But thanks for the idea, and for the stroll down memory lane, definitely.