| Monday
March 4, 2002
USB Flash
Regarding the responses to this subject:
1) The 4MBit/sec WRite, 7.2Mbit/sec Read speed is
directly off of the packaging and the Transcend (www.transcendusa.com )
web site. I have no way to verify this speed, but I suppose there are
benchmarks somewhere that would do this. But the transfer speed is not
that important to me.
2) I wouldn't (and didn't) recommend the device for
data backup, but as an easy way to transfer files between computers
("sneakernet") as when one would work on files off-site, or to
use for portable presentations (a PowerPoint presentation or Autocad
drawing can easily fit on the device).
3) My use (and recommendation) for the devices was
for 'sneakernet', as a way to work on data files at home (for instance,
during web page development). Good backups are a must, of course; for that
I use the CD Writer to store important data at home (at work, we have a
server dedicated to tape backups).
Thanks...
Rick Hellewell
Indeed. And these are wonderful
gadgets. Niven and I use them now on trips: we can transfer a novel between
machines without setting up a Zip drive. I still use ZIP where the drives
are already set up. And of course by using the gadget to transfer we DO get
a useful backup independent of both laptops.
The following concerns Everquest...
Hail!
Seems that many of us in EQ land are having trouble
since the Shadows of Luclin expansion came out. Random Lockups are going
to kill EQ if they don't address the hardware issues that are demonizing
their game. Rather than fighting with my hardware, I may have to give up
my 2+ year investment in EQ and go play something else. I had Win98, a
Voodoo 5 with a Tyan 400 (1854) motherboard with a VIA chipset and a
P3800EB with 512 MB SDRAM when the SoL came out. No random lockups there,
just extreemy choppy and unplayable in large groups. So, I read some
reviews and got an AMD 1800+ with a Soyo Dragon + and a Geforce Ti 200
(oh, and 512 MB 2700 OCZ DDR [256x2]). Having trolled every tidbit and
tweak Google could find for me, nothing works. Yesterday, I went and got a
ATI 8500 but have yet to put in a session on EQ. I swear, if this doesn't
work, it will be a painful farewell to my friends on EQ. Seems that the
people that make the game have hardware requirments that are met (along
with the right O/S) but seem to not care that the players are having this
trouble (most are, arguably, with newer equipment). The video card
companies say "our cards cant share IRQ's" but don't have lists
of reccomended motherboards they can go on and motherboard companies don't
give a rats rear about the videocard people... ad infinitum. If you still
play EQ, what hardware do you use?
Thanks!
Rusty Coleman Baton Rouge, LA
This will be addressed in the March
column.
I have had none of those problems
with an Intel system based on an Intel D815EEAL2 board and a 933 MhZ
Pentium 3; the video board is a random (MSI actually, $79 from New Egg)
GeForce 2. I have also had no problems with Intel 2 GHz systems and
GeForce boards.
I have had some problems, none as
severe as yours, with an AMD Athlon 1.2 and a GeForce 2, and I can only
conclude that some of the well known bridge problems in most motherboards
built for Athlon chips (not the chips themselves) have been responsible.
This comes from considerable experience of systems side by side sharing an
internet connection and having identical video boards: the Athlon has more
Everquest problems than the others. It is a sample of one, of course, but
I also know about some of the northbridge problems with the motherboards
built for AMD systems.
I am experimenting with some other
combinations including an AMD Dual built from the AMD chipset mentioned in
today's BYTE  ,
and we will see what comes of that.
I do have link problems you probably
don't have since I don't have DSL and the satellite won't connect to
Everquest so I get linkdeath more often than I like, but in general I
don't have the problems you describe, and the Luclin 3d images are very
nice...
I think the following needs no
comment:
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Would you like to hear my flight story? About a
fortnight ago I went out to the airport; I was some two hours early for
the departure time, so I had to wait in line at check-in for about 15
minutes. Before that, bags through the X-ray, self through that doorway
thing, followed by a pat down by a security guard. After check-in, through
to airside, browse in the duty-free, then, after a meal, to the gate, walk
down the tunnel, board the aircraft. Which took off about five minutes
early. After a long flight, dismebark, through Immigration, pick up bag
that went in the hold, through Customs, who did not want me to open either
piece of baggage, taxi into the city and about my business. Return trip
was almost exactly the same, except that, arriving three hours before the
flight, I did not have to stand in line at Check-in at all. That plane
also took off a few minutes early. Coming back, there was a stopover for
about ninety minutes in another city, where I was allowed off to go and
get a cup of coffee and browse the shops. Straight back on to the plane,
and on to my destination.
Two other things. One, discounting the women and
children, quite a large proportion of the passengers were what is usually
described as sallow or olive-skinned, and I wouldn't be surprised if quite
a large number of them were called Mohammed. Two, the airports in question
were Bahrain and Hong Kong, and the stopover city was Dubai. Do you
suppose that the US authorities are guilty of over-reaction?
The quote, I believe, is Rousseau. "Man is born
free yet is everywhere in chains." Well, not in all countries.
Tony E.
[and see below]
Hi Jerry, The wheels of bureaucracy grind on. From
our local paper:
"When it came to disposing of his waste oil,
Brian Creegan did everything right, and he did it to the letter of the
law.
He knows he could have easily dumped the oil from
his small business illegally, but that would have been wrong.
And he's about to pay for doing the right thing.
Creegan knows a bill is coming his way soon,
courtesy of the U.S. government. It will be a big bill for a small
business owner -- at least $11,855.20, probably more -- levied for the
environmental sins of someone else..."
< http://search.newschoice.com/ArchiveDisplay.asp
?story=d:\index\newsarchives\lo\midsen\fpg\20020303
\1390266_tfront.txt&source=www%2Esentinelandenterprise
%2Ecom&puid=&paper=Sentinel+%26+Enterprise+Online >
(I hope this long URL works!)
As if we needed more proof that "the Law is an
ass"!
Cheers, Rod Schaffter
It is likely we will see much more of this sort
of thing.
Concerning the current column:
Jerry,
I have an issue with this statement.
I have a minor ethical dilemma here: I
believe in competition, and I certainly want Intel to have at least one
major competitor. At the same time, I just can't recommend any
single-processor AMD system. It's not the AMD Athlon chips, which are so
far as I can tell quite stable and solid; it's the support chip sets,
which aren't.
Early chipsets for the Athlon had stability
problems. That has not been the case for years. This affected the very
first AMD 750 and VIA KX133 based motherboards. Since Socket A came about
the stability problems have gone away. I have no idea what you are basing
this statement on. I have tested chipsets from VIA, Ali, SiS, Nvidia, and
soon ATI. They do not have stability problems. The stability problems out
there stem from user error in most cases. You have to install drivers for
all of these chipsets, including AMD’s. Stating that the chipsets are
not stable is really doing a great disservice to AMD and the 3rd party
chipset vendors. I build the systems for our Governor’s Campaign, and
the box he uses at the capitol and the governor’s mansion. I use VIA
chipsets, and guess what, there are no problems. Also, whoever that tall
guy was at the Compaq booth at Comdex was a jerk. I would expect more from
Byte.
Thanks,
Chris Tom
www.amdzone.com
www.socketa.com
Statements like "I would expect more"
from partisans are common but not helpful. I'm glad you have no problems
with VIA chipset systems. Unfortunately too many have. Bill Godbout used
to say "if an error rate is high enough to measure, it's too
high." The fact is that the northbridge problems of systems with VIA
chipsets are measurable. The error rate isn't terribly high and won't show
up at all with many combinations of software and peripherals, but there
are errors, they are repeatable, and I for one don't want to take the
chances. Most of this is going in the column.
Clearly one should install the proper drivers for
systems. I don't recall ever giving contrary advice.
I don't know who the tall guy at the COMDEX booth
was. Byte didn't have a large presence at COMDEX since we were not giving
the awards. I was there, but apparently this wasn't me.
You have given me no reasons to change my views.
Hiya! "...I
have a minor ethical dilemma here: I believe in competition, and I
certainly want Intel to have at least one major competitor. At the same
time, I just can't recommend any single-processor AMD system. It's not the
AMD Athlon chips, which are so far as I can tell quite stable and solid;
it's the support chip sets, which aren't..."
Pray tell, where did you come up with this fallacy?
And, tell me, how many professionally built AMD powered systems have you
tested?
In the summer of 2000, my partner and I decided to
switch all our uniprocessor production to Athlons, partly because of the
average lower cost than Intel silicon, but also because of superior
performance. We did experience some issues with ALI chipsets and have not
used them since. However, we have never had a problem with the original
AMD 750 Irongate chipset on Gigabyte boards (we have two UNIX servers
powered by that combination) nor have we had any trouble with the AMD 760,
Via KT133 chipsets and their successors. To date we have built some forty
uniprocessor servers and over 300 PCs with Athlon power. None has ever
exhibited any stability that could be attributed to a chipset issue. In
fact, one of our clients who purchased 16 Athlon powered PCs and an Athlon
powered server last year placed another order for PCs and specified that
they be Athlons. To me, that's a ringing endorsement.
Objectivity is a very expensive commodity in the
computer press. The price often is too high for many journalists and they
tend to make claims based upon some kind of hidden agendum. If you are
going to make such a generalization as you did in your article, could you
please offer some supporting data to back up your allegations? Otherwise,
you can't protest too loudly when you are flamed for being in bed with
Intel. You aren't a shill for them, are you?
Bill Brier, the Prez BCS Technology Limited
Bill Brier [steggy@bcstechnology.com]
No.
Hello Jerry, I can't believe that you would say such
a thing in your article. I have a minor ethical dilemma here: I believe in
competition, and I certainly want Intel to have at least one major
competitor. At the same time, I just can't recommend any single-processor
AMD system. It's not the AMD Athlon chips, which are so far as I can tell
quite stable and solid; it's the support chip sets, which aren't.
I was a charter subscriber to Byte and still have
issue # 1. I've read your articles since you've been writing them for
Byte. Frankly, I think you ought to be more knowledgeable about this
stuff. I can understand being biased, I'm very biased about AMD but to
tell an out and out lie about AMD chipsets is wrong. Do you even have any
experience with Athlon systems? If you've had a bad experience at least
say so. I've had bad experiences with both Intel and AMD systems. I had a
Socket7 System that was unstable. Mostly because of the ATI video card.
But those were issues with ATI and VIA chipsets.
I've had three athlon systems and have not had a
single problem with any of them. My company sells Athlon / Duron systems
and we have far fewer returns on them than we do on Intel systems. Please
look at the data before making such claims in the future.
Your long time fan,
Michael Roberts.
========================================== Michael
Roberts Director Product Development 1st CTI LLC Nashville Research &
Engineering Labs. mikeroberts@1cti.com http://www.1cti.com
==========================================
I have had half a dozen AMD systems over the
years. I even built one to go to the Persian Gulf on the USS Tripoli. They
have all "worked" and most haven't appeared to have more
problems than anything else: the noise levels from software and operating
systems often overwhelm the contributions of hardware to failures.
Clearly most people haven't had problems. I still
have no reason to revise what I said.
And
How do you not get flamed when you say supporting
chipsets for athlons arent stable? Which chipsets are you talking about?
Thats an extremely vague remark to make without giving one chipset to
reference. Your basically dropping a hint that someone shouldnt get an
Athlon. Im a system builder and I have yet to have a single customer have
any problem with any system that has been built for them. I use brand from
VIA, SIS and others and still have not have any problems since the early
ASUS KZM bios issues. Thanks Todd
I fear I do not know what to say to that. Or to
the following:
You wierd fu*k*r! [Ed note: original not
bowdlerized] What year do you think it is?
Athlon chipsets are the backbone of the enthusiast market. We're not
exactly tolerant of unstable products, and we certainly arent tolerant of
spurious bastards like yourself.
Somebody's getting spam!
Weyland Corporation [aleksei1282@hotmail.com]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. Click Here
But I find it interesting. Presumably this is
testimony to the integrity of the Weyland Corporation whatever that is.
It was followed by:
Greetings Wierd fu*k*r! [Ed note original was not
bowdlerized]
We wanted to let you know that Worst Nightmare
created a SPAM.com electronic post card for you. Click this link to see
it, or copy and paste this link into your Web browser's address line:
http://www.spam.com/12/GAL5.16_21.cfm?jlw051258=8771
If you'd like to send your own SPAM electronic post
card, use the "send your own SPAM post card" link at the bottom
of the e-card collection page.
Enjoy!
SPAM.com
P.S. To us, your privacy is a priority. Here's a
direct link to our online Privacy Policy statement if you'd like to review
it.
http://www.spam.com/hp/hp_lg.htm
I believe that California has some laws on this.
As to
> At the same time, I just can't recommend
any single-processor AMD system. It's not the AMD Athlon chips, which are
so > far as I can tell quite stable and solid; it's the support chip
sets, which aren't. >
I think you will find that the SIS 735 Socket A
chipset is completely stable and offers very high performance at low cost.
I have an ECS K7S5A MB with a Duron 750 and it has been the most stable MB
I have used to date.
Cheers
Duncan Munro
Thanks for the data. I'll try to look into it.
SIS has not always had the reputation of being the highest quality
chipsets on the block, but I am told they are a good match to the newest
Athlons.
As I have said often, at the lower end there is
little price competition between Intel and AMD. They all work pretty well,
too, and the driver situation is better every week.
At the very highest end the applications and
drivers get very important and there are a lot of instabilities in the
software side of things. Until recently there wasn't any SMP
competition to begin with, and systems with VIA chipsets had small but
measurable problems.
The bottom line is that for standard systems
doing standard things go with what you like and your prejudices toward or
against Intel or AMD will likely not matter. As you move toward more
complicated things with more intensive tasks, the motherboard bridge
connections and timings become far more important. I would myself stay
with as conservative a hardware design as I could find if I were doing
things that caused my system problems due to the sheer speed of
operations.
At the speeds the high end systems operate in
now, memory quality, power quality, everything is at the edge: things have
to go just right. It's amazing that they do. If you are comfortable with
AMD at that level, by all means stay with what you like.
But Intel has more test engineers than AMD has
engineers. Think on that when you think about being out at the bleeding
edge.
I wish AMD well, and for standard systems I doubt
anyone would notice the difference between an AMD box and and Intel box:
as I have said many times both here and in the column. And with the new
dual processor chipset boards it looks good for genuine competition
between AMD and Intel. But I still have no reason to change what I said.
If I were to change my views it would be because
of this kind of thing:
Hi!
I just read your column, and I was wondering what
kind of basis you have for saying that the motherboard chipsets for
Athlons are unstable?
I'm the editor of the Temple Of Technology website,
www.templeoftech.com, and I've tested quite a few AMD motherboards (both
for the site, personal systems and systems I've built for friends) in the
last two years. I've found all the current Athlon motherboards to be very
stable and fast performers. Even the $60 ECS K7AMA is very stable.
For my personal system, I'm using the EPOX 8K7A+
(AMD 761 based), and it is rock solid. I run a lot of heavy duty
applications, and it NEVER crashes..
regards,
Vidar Langberget
But once again we are dealing with low
probability problems and small numbers of cases. Most people won't
experience problems anyway.
And those who want to build their own system can
use whatever the like: they don't need my approval or permission. As to
me, at higher end systems intended for complex operations, I will stay
with Intel, a position I have had for some time: but I found the new chip
sets interesting enough to point out that the dual processor motherboards
look not to have difficulties. The result is that I have been put on spam
lists by AMD enthusiasts. Really makes me fond of the company and writing
about it.
And one final comment by Joel Rosenberg and we're
done with this since the time I might spend with letters is going to have
to be invested in fighting the spam that the AMD supporters have arranged
for me.
Your argument about the bleeding edge/AMD thing
makes sense to me, and I think one of the lessons is to stay away from the
edge unless you've got a good reason to do otherwise.
("I've got the time, money, and the desire to
play," is IMHO, a perfectly fine reason; so, obviously, is "I'm
doing forty-five minute compiles three times a day, and it looks like I
can cut that time in half by upgrading.")
Even when it works right -- which, most of the time,
for most people, it seems to -- that Extra Edge Tax can be high. Not just
for the latest equipment, either -- there was a time when the better
performance of SCSI drives was so much better than their IDE equivalents
that there were some interesting cost/benefit tradeoffs, most of which
have vanished. (I'm told that if you stripe a RAID-0 partition across four
7200 RPM IDE disks, with a sensible controller/cable setup and you'll be
hard put to find a two-disk SCSI RAID setup it won't leave in the dust,
unless you've got a immense amount of money to throw at the latest and
widest and fastest.)
My experience, generally pretty far from the
bleeding edge (my 850mhz Athlon was, I believe, two steps down from the
fastest chip AMD chip in the store when I bought it), but when I did my
latest upgrade (added a CD burner and a couple hard drives -- my root
directory is now on a RAID-5 array, which means that I've got to lose two
drives to lose any data) there were some . . . interesting moments during
the in-store testing, until we upgraded the power supply to a more robust
one, after which things worked like a charm, and are still working just
fine.
Then again, I'm not in the business of exploring the
bleeding edge, nor do I do a lot of heavy-CPU graphics manipulation very
often.
If I were to replace the motherboard, I'd probably
still go for something a couple of steps back from the fastest available,
although a two-cpu motherboard would be awfully tempting, given reports
I've gotten on the Linux SMP kernel, and I've still got the notion of
playing with a Mosix array on my "gee, that'd be fun, and it wouldn't
be too horribly expensive" list.
Still, the old rule applies: the best is the enemy
of good enough, and for what I do, what I've got is more than good enough.
-- ------------------------------------- There's a
widow in sleepy Chester Who weeps for her only son; There's a grave on the
Pabeng River, A grave that the Burmans shun, And there's Subadar Prag
Tewarri Who tells how the work was done.
-------------------------------------
I don't find one word to argue with there. And of
course there are millions of AMD systems working quite well: I have built
and reported on about 10 of them in the course of this column.
And let's wrap this up with a comment that is
worth paying attention to:
Jerry:
I read your column every week, in fact, it is one of
the highlights of my week. I don't beleive, however, that you have been
exposed to the current range of chipsets and boards available for AMD
Athlons -- if you had, you couldn't possibly throw out such a blanket
recommendation.
It is true that the early VIA chipsets had some compatibility
issues and flaky BIOS's. No one in their right mind will argue that. The
Athlon also generates a fairly high thermal load and has a high power
demand. If you try and force on a cooler designed for a PIII, you will
shatter your core and void your warranty. These issues have caused early
adopters and the ham fisted some long nights of frustration.
The latest VIA chipsets are quite stable, as are the
latest from Nvidia. I've seen several of these in the last few months. The
trick is, as it has always been, to buy a quality mainboard, power supply,
video card and case and assemble with due care. A couple of months ago, I
built a new PC with an ECS mainboard with a SIS chipset and a Duron CPU
for myself. It's been flawless -- board $99, CPU $90 in Canadian dollars.
I'm pretty much an agnostic when it comes to buying
computer gear -- there are Intel zealots, AMD zealots, Linux zealots, etc.
etc.
I try to use the best piece of technology for the
task at hand. I have Pentiums and Athlons and K6's and even a Centaur
kicking around. I use Windows and Linux and different flavors of BSD. I
still have an active account on one of my company's Alpha servers running
VMS.
My opinion, right now, I wouldn't buy a Celeron or
PIII; the P4 to be worth the money looking forward has to be the new core
(2 or 2.2 GHz). The best low end buy is Duron/Athlon. There is no best buy
at the high end, as Intel is due to ramp speed soon, and performance will
unlikely ramp with current chipsets, and AMD is due to ramp to Hammer
soon.
Rick Spencer
I have several times said I look forward to
Nvidia and AMD working together. And my view is more or less yours, one
uses the tools that do the job.
And of course I can't see everything. I don't
have the 30 editors and 9 technicians BYTE used to have in Peterborough.
There's me and my advisory group, and I try to give the best advice I can:
and my wrapup is that just as few butter adds tell us that it tastes just
like margarine, there are few Intel adds that say their chips are
AMD-compatible. Absent pretty good reason -- and cost is of course a
pretty good reason -- I advise people to stay with the standards, and
don't overclock the system; the potential gains outweigh the losses. And
of course there will be people who try everything and overclock it all and
some of them send me reports I trust and pay attention to, and it's a lot
of fun.
For most purposes AMD systems work fine. My
problems have been with screwy operations, USB peripherals, and odd
software like, for example, Everquest. None of them have been so severe
that I have retired the Athlon systems. But if I really want Intel
compatibility there's a simple way to be sure I have it: and Intel still
has more test engineers than AMD has engineers.
The interesting thing is I am now on a hundred
porno spam lists because I wrote to say that despite problems in the past
I am recommending the new AMD systems. No good deed goes unpunished.
And you are correct: the statement I made was
intended to be taken in the context of many columns which have reported
that I use Athlon systems and have had few problems with them. I am aware
that most people don't have problems and I have said so often enough, or
thought I had.
This came off stronger than intended. So now I
have to set my rules to reject the porn offers. It has certainly made me
love AMD users more. And yes, I am aware that this is the work of a very
few people. The AMD press relations people are horrified. Me, I have to
reset my rules fairly often anyway so it's not that big a deal. But it has
been enlightening.
On another topic:
<i> [I think the following needs no
comment:]
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Would you like to hear my flight
story?.....the airports in question were Bahrain and Hong Kong, and
the stopover city was Dubai. Do you suppose that the US authorities are
guilty of over-reaction?....
Tony E.</i>
Well, actually it does need a comment. While I am
just as disgusted with the illogical and downright stupid approach that
our airport authorities have been taking regarding security, it is
certainly not fair to compare us to airports in nations that, as far as I
am aware, are a considerable distance farther down the list of radical
Islamic targets than the United States--if they are on the list at all. No
skyscrapers have fallen in Hong Kong, nor do I expect to hear about planes
being flown into buildings in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Tom Brosz
Clearly.
Roland says:
Let it Be.
http://zdnet.com.com/2110-1106-850296.html
I was for a while an enthusiast for the Be
operating system, which was a good development environment; but it never
caught on, and seems to be going away. RIP
U should have ur PHD REVOKED!!!
Obviously, you didn't get your PHD in a
computer-related field 'cause you have no idea what you're talking about!
Rob Ohlee [ohlee2000@hotmail.com]
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
Another of those intelligent and cogent remarks
that makes one really want to write about the object of their enthusiasm.
If all this reminds one of the time when I said the 128K Mac was a decent
operating system attached to a toy computer, I can't help it.
TOP
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