TheInquirer has just released an article comparing the results of a HP 4 dual core AMD Opteron CPU (eight core) server and a 16 way 3 gig 4MB L3 Cache Xeon server from Unisys. The conclusion drawn is that the 4 CPU dual core AMD Opteron is 20% faster then the 16 core Xeon server. They are also much cheaper as the Xeon CPU’s go for nearly 4000 dollars each.

TheInq was also nice enough to direct our attention to an Anantech review which shows the 2.2 gig dual Opteron is 18% faster then the fastest (3.3 gig) quad Xeon solution. The Inq article can be found here.

These are all very preliminary results and the results might vary once the products become more widely available, but the indicators are good that AMD wasn’t exagerating about their dual core performance and that Dell will have to really drop their pants price wise to be able to offer similar price/performance solutions based on Intel CPU’s until 2006 when Intel unveil their dual core server CPU’s as I intimated 4 days ago. The saying that nobody ever got fired for buying Intel may not be true for the next 8 months or so if these results are true indications of the dual core Opterons worth. The fact that the Opterons are lower clocked, use less power and generate less heat probably won’t hurt AMD either. So there you have it, early tests show that AMD has it all over Intel in price, performance and heat/power production. Lets see what Dell has to say after a few months of trying to explain to customers why they should buy a lesser Intel based solution. For myself, I’m planning to find out how well a 64bit Athlon X2 dual core 4600+ handles running a web server. Even people that bluntly refuse to buy AMD should be happy about this because it means Intel is going to really have to drop it’s prices to stay in the game for the rest of the year.
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For a second opinion, see tech-report.

Sometimes you are just handed a freebie and it’s all you can do to stop yourself from swooning in delight. This is such a freebie. Microsoft is about to start a big new ad campaign to promote all the wonderful things you can do with the aging Windows XP Operating System. Their ad department apparently don’t agree as they did at least some of the art work using Adobe Photoshop on a Macintosh. To see for yourself, get yourself a copy of Textpad or another text editor that can handle binary (HEX) formats and then download this image from Microsoft’s web site and open it in your editor. If you look down a few lines, you will see this: “Adobe Photoshop CS Macintosh 2005:04:07 11:35:29”. (Be aware that the image is nearly 8MB in size.) Get your copy of the image from their site while you can as it isn’t likely to be around for long now that Microsoft know the secret is out. Apparently all the wonderful things you can do with Windows XP doesn’t include making advertising images for Microsoft, at least for one or more of their artists. For that/those creative soul(s), a “no Microsoft software” solution was the answer going by that text string in the image. This bodes very well for Apple’s upcoming OSX Tiger release and if they are smart, they’ll make good use of it.

Isn’t irony a hoot? (click the image for a closer look)

Recently, I’ve noticed that Anti-virus/spyware/firewall software has been in the headlines more for their flaws then their benefits. Today you can have protective software all over your PC and get compromised anyway. Worse, your security software may have provided the hole that is used to compromise you, or that a bug allowed malicious software to turn off your protection. Some recent examples of flaws in security software: idefense has released an advisory about a McAfee flaw that could be used in conjunction with a web browser flaw (for example) to replace McAfee’s files with malicious versions and potentially fully compromise a machine. Prior to that other examples abound. Symantec had an ActiveX flaw in their online scanner that could allow malicious hackers to use their ActiveX control to install malicious code. Around the same time (mid 2003) Trend Micro had a similar ActiveX problem with their own online scanner. These are by no means the only flaws found and nearly all the top security companies have had such problems. Google reveals much if you just ask it nicely. See here for Trend Micro, here for Symantec and here for McAfee. The question this should have users asking, is “If we can’t trust the people putting the locks on our doors to do a good job, who can we trust?”

Microsoft have just patched a serious hole in Windows explorer that can be used to execute any command based just on a user highlighting a file. Such a command might easily be an FTP command to download a Trojan horse or other nasties. Microsoft were told about the flaw at the start of February, so don’t believe them when they tell you patches come faster when you’re with Microsoft. The flaw advisory can be found at Greymagic.

In other news, Microsoft have finally patched the Media player hole in MP9 and 10 after promising to do so months ago. More evidence that Microsoft is no better, and potentially worse at releasing critical patches then any other OS provider (contrary to their “Get the facts” campaign).

Some more Microsoft related tit-bits.
Yet another variant of the Sober worm (Sober-N) that has been punishing Windows users for ages now has appeared and this one is spreading quickly by spamming copies of itself with English or German messages to any addresses found in a myriad of file types on the infected computer. The Virus industry seems to advance at an astonishing rate as Sophos already has news on a Sober-M variant. If you run Windows of any version, it is critically important that you don’t open attachments you were not expecting, and don’t open any unless you have scanned them with an up to date virus scanner first. It isn’t hard advice, but surprisingly an amazing amount of people don’t do it. Actually that advice should go for all Operating Systems, but it’s an order of magnitude more important for Windows users.

Recently Fred Langa of Langa list fame wrote an article critical of the Firefox web browser. Among other things he claimed that Firefox had had more security flaws then IE in the past months. What he doesn’t look at is how many were exploited, how they were found (often because Mozilla pays people to find them), how quickly they were fixed and most importantly, how serious they were. Tom Raftery has done an excellent article explaining how much more vulnerable people were with IE then Firefox in the past year. (For one thing IE has many more critically serious flaws, most of Firefox’s were fairly trivial and none were exploited.) The Langa list has been very beneficial to millions of computer users over the years and it is a shame to see such a poorly researched article from him. One thing I did find while looking into the issue was this page, which explains in detail how to create your own copy of Windows 2000 completely bereft of Internet Explorer, (along with Outlook Express, Media player and IIS). Proving that Microsoft wasn’t entirely honest when they said IE couldn’t be removed from Windows. Be warned though, that creating the new win2000 CD is not for newbies.

Resolvo Systems has released their “MoveOver” Windows to Linux migration software as Open Source. The software could be very useful for enterprise and government mass Linux migrations like those happening in Munich and various other places around the world. The software collects all your user data from Windows and implements the same settings and appearance in Linux. The new homepage can be found at Sourceforge.

Lastly Techworld has some interesting information on the amount of SPAM we are getting and where it comes from. The answer to the first item is between 68 and 83% of all mail depending on who you ask. The answer to the second item is the US who are apparently responsible for 35.7% of the worlds spam. Head over to our Windows security site for information and free software you can use to combat Virus, Spyware and SPAM threats.

Recently MSN has started sending visitors this way who were looking for registry cleaners (don’t ask me why). In order to stop it from being a wasted visit, I’m going to mention two useful free tools I have used in the past to clean up machines I’ve been asked to fix. The first such program is one I use for Windows 2000 and XP systems and it’s called CCleaner, among other things it will find and remove invalid entries from your system registry.

The second tool I use when asked to fix systems running Windows based on the Win95 tree, (Win98, Win98, Win98SE, WinME) is called Easy Cleaner and does a very nice job of fixing registry errors in Win98 and co, (again among other things). So if you arrived here after searching for registry fixit in MSN, it hopefully won’t have been in vain now. Enjoy.

Trading Technologies, a company based in Chicago has a few software based patents for their trading system and have just filed suit against a UK firm by the name of Man group (a hedge fund company) in the hopes of getting a 2.5 cent contribution per trade on the Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Eurex US and Euronext.liffe exchanges. Trading Technologies have stated that their software saves much more then would be provided by the 2.5 cent per trade tax would return.

This quote from Josh Poulson describes three of the software patents.

One of the patents appears to describe any trading order entry system that displays market depth (essentially the difference between highest bid and lowest ask prices) and allows a trader to select (with one click) a region of prices in which to place an order it could affect a large number of home-grown or commercial trading software. The next patent describes the fancy table that is used to describe the market. The third appears to patent the idea of using multiple colors to make a more readable chart, although the added value comes from specifying additional colors to parameters of the table on the fly.

For more detail on the patents and lawsuits see Groklaw. This should start people thinking about the real consequences of Software patents if they can use patent litigation to get a tax on trading transactions. The odd thing about the three patents listed above is that two of them are similiar to what has been used by pricing comparison software and websites for years. Just taking an existing concept and applying it to an alternative subject does not constitute “state of the art” and “non obvious” so at least a couple of the patents should not have been issued in the first place. (Although I am of the opinion that patents that describe software methods shouldn’t be valid at all as they generally help one and hurt many.)

Dell is the 800 pound gorilla in the hardware arena, they have mastered the mass produced, mass marketed PC market for some time now and always seem to show glowing revenue when others are faltering. Could their decision to sell only Intel CPU’s affect that ranking in the future? I rather suspect it will, at least in the server market as Intel have stumbled somewhat with their CPU range and arguably given AMD something of an advantage.

AMD’s Opteron CPU’s are very good performers, and compare very favourably with Intel’s Xeon CPU range in both price and performance. That alone won’t win the race for AMD, but it’s possible that dual core Opterons might make a significant difference. AMD has a couple of things that Intel doesn’t, Hypertransport is far more effective then the bus architecture Intel has used in present and past systems. The integrated memory controller in the Opteron, together with multiple Hypertransport interconnects has enabled the Opteron to leave Xeon in it’s wake for memory intensive applications. When you add in the fact that Opterons where designed for 64bit and multicore from the word go, and that Intel has seemingly been playing catch-up and grafting the new features like 64bit and multi-core to it’s existing line-up you begin to get an idea of how the dual core server processor race is likely to turn out (at least until Intel catch up). Not only that, but dual core Opterons run on the same motherboards that single core Opterons do, usually requiring only a bios update. That gives buyers the ability to buy a cheap single core CPU based system now, and upgrade to dual core by simply replacing the CPU later on (or buy a dual CPU server now, and upgrade to four cores later on). Enterprise cares more about price and performance then it does about marketing. Now that Opteron (and thereby AMD) has gained itself a stable foothold in the server market, if a dual core Opteron system is the same price as a Xeon system, but out performs it significantly, most will end up choosing the Opteron based system. All AMD has to do is make sure that enterprise CTO’s know about their superior performance and pricing.

Dell will be able to compete on price. Because of their massive buying power, they would be getting unrivalled pricing for their base hardware, but can they use pricing to compete against superior performance in the server market? Dell has said many times that they will consider offering AMD based systems if enough people ask, but many in the industry seem to think that is just to get more concessions from Intel. If Dell were to start offering a successful Opteron based line of servers, the current AMD/Intel market share figures would significantly change almost overnight. As it stands now, we have Dell in one corner offering Intel only, in the other corner we have IBM, HP and Sun offering AMD Opteron based systems. HP has already revealed it’s dual core based systems, and we can expect the same from the others in the coming weeks. Intel isn’t even slated to release it’s dual core Xeon’s until Q1 2006 which gives AMD a significant lead time to further penetrate into enterprise server rooms.

It has taken AMD many years of hard work to get past the “Intel inside” mentality that a vast portion of the market once clung to, and they have made great strides in that regard. It remains to be seen just how well the dual core Opterons perform before we know if they will dramatically improve AMD’s performance lead. Based upon what I have read about the respective technology in the past year, I wouldn’t even consider another Intel based system unless there was a serious price difference in favour to Intel, something that going from past history is unlikely to happen any time soon. Hopefully Dual core Opterons will extend that technological lead further. As it stands now, I know what CPU all my new machines will be based on.