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Well, first off, $15 just doesn't jive.

I'm willing to say maybe $150... anyways...

>If we assume for a moment that half of these are defective, this means it would only cost an additional $15, on average, to make perfect LCDs with no bad pixels.

Well, at one point (a long while ago, but I digress) the success rate with LCDs was 10%.

It's now 18%.

That's at the current max 10 dead pixel rates (depends on who makes it). I would think you can chop those numbers by 10 or more if you want perfection. That makes a $150 LCD $1500 to make perfect, not to mention disposal costs.

Most consumer products cost about 20% - 50% of the original price to manufacture (or so it seems from my poking about), which would mean the $1500 LCD becomes a $3000 - $7500 LCD when it's on the shelves of your local Best Buy. And that's for a 15" LCD.

Who the hell will pay that much for one? I sure wouldn't.

Free vibrator advertised with every mobile phone. also MIT accidentally invents cellular sex toy, and there's a vibrator slip cover which I could not find because google has been poisoned badly which I believe it meant for those ubiquitous nokia phones (the basic nokia phone is the honda civic of the cellular world.)

9800 Pro sells for 220 on newegg, the R420 GPU is has been delivered to other OEM's and ATI is already tapped out and making GPU's. I guess this is the one with the new 3.0 Pixel Shaders.

Check around for prices, newegg/pricewatch/etc.

9800 Pro sells for 220 on newegg, the R420 GPU is has been delivered to other OEM's and ATI is already tapped out and making GPU's. I guess this is the one with the new 3.0 Pixel Shaders.

Check around for prices, newegg/pricewatch/etc.

Are you sure about that high definition part? I've been told that most porn companies aren't going to HD if they can help it. Apparently fuzzy displays help many models look good, and you wouldn't want to meet them in real life.

My source was the author of this piece, but the article gives a different impression from talking to him in person. Make what you will of it.

I should sue somebody over HTTP as I also own the idea of hypertext.
BT beat you to it.

And, of course, Groklaw has a summary of today's court action. Basically SCO ends up looking stupid again.

A READER WRITES to bring our attention to latest issue of German magazine, c't.

According to the magazine's own tests, a new Intel V8 compiler can give a boost to the performance of applications running on Intel platforms by between 5 and 10 per cent.

The chipmaker may be miffed to learn, however, that its compiler can help boost the same apps by a similar margin on rival AMD's Athlon64 platform, when suitably tweaked.

According to our correspondent, the compiler switch -QxN produces x86 code which runs only on P4 CPUs, not on AMD CPUs. However, the boffins at c't used the -QxN to produce code, patched out the CPU type inquiry and so managed to get the code to run on the Athlon64.

As a result the chip notched up a record-breaking Spec score.

According to the tests, under Windows, the P4 3200 gets a SPECint2000base value of 1286 while the Athlon64 3400+ scores 1404. Although, in SPECfp2000base, the P4 3200 scores 1257, against the Athlon64 3400+'s score of 1227.

Hmmm.

Here's a link to c't where you'll find no mention of these shenanigans whatsoever.

Now, with Microsoft taking a tougher stance on XBox DRM that might not necessarily be the case with XBox 2. (The D0, for instance, already is different on v1.0-v1.2 and v1.3-1.5 boxes; though not necessarily to prevent the installation of third-party addons) Sure, there's eventually going to be a way to circumvent any kind of copy protection but it might take a while...

It has great TV-out, an expandable hard disk, a 100 MBit ethernet port, available remote control, and is very rugged and portable. Not to mention the availability of emulators for MAME, PSX, N64, SNES, GameBoy, etc. And of course there's native Xbox games, which can be played right off the hard-disk!

BTW, M$ takes a loss on each one.

Heaven forbid Intel reduce the 100W portable heater to a lower wattage.

Read some of the stuff in my sig, man. Intel has some "hot stuff" coming our way. *Lots* of solid-state storage. Although Intel hasn't gotten specific in their patents, Hitachi now has a good one that illustrates the magnatude of what is coming. A quote:

To resolve the aforementioned problems with the present invention, the present invention has the object of providing a memory cell structure and forming method for that memory cell utilizing a vertical transistor and capable of achieving a memory cell with a surface area of 4F.sup.2.

[...]

This laminated film is processed to a line-and-space state at a pitch of 0.2 microns as shown in FIG. 6.

[...]

Next as shown in FIG. 8, these can be formed in a line-and-space state with a pitch of 0.2 microns, in a direction perpendicular to the first wiring (701) that was previously formed.

So, to summarize, they have a 2-terminal memory device with a bit line pitch of 0.2 microns in both directions. 1000 microns in a millimeter = 25,000,000 cells per square MILLIMETER. The Intel patents hint to at least 2 layers of cells per chip and multi-bit capability of at least 4. Leaving room for addressing and logic, this works out to about 2 Gigabytes per square centimeter. Intel is going to stack this on the processor.

They will be releasing this in their upcoming Tejas processor. IMHO, the "stackable" design is for memory expansion - not for "64-bit extensions" as mentioned in the article. Also - Windows "Elements", also mentioned in the article, will be embedded into this NVRAM. DRM at its finest. It might be hard to buy one of these processors without a copy of Windows.

It looks like the only browser immune to this is Opera.

"Though little-used, the tricky URL form is a recognised Internet standard as documented in various RFC documents. For this reason the developers of other browsers, like Mozilla, don't feel they can simply get rid of it. Instead, the Mozilla developers and a horde of kibitzers have spent almost a year and 156 comments discussing what can be done. Right now that effort has got precisely nowhere and Mozilla users are almost as vulnerable as Internet Exploder users to being hoaxed in this way."

So make sure you do get a 3rd generation (or preferably older) XBox with the old pre-"Live 2.0" dash.

It would seem that the real goal is to show how many people are stupid enough to still click on attachments when they have no idea what the fuck they are.

Athlon64 chips and Opteron chips use the same core, so they will run the same software. Some versions of Opteron support SMP, but no Athlon64 chips support it. The various chips have various amounts of cache, various memory configurations they will work with, etc. For example, the socket 754 chip works with plain old DDR400 RAM, but only has one memory channel.

If you want the specifics, I suggest you use Google. Here's a good article to start with:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10954

steveha

The inquirer have now picked up the story. /. could have had it first but 'twas rejected (grouse grouse)

An excellent illustration of the differences is the cost of cocaine at different points along the production and distribution chain.

As far as Microsoft products such as Windows and Office are concerned, the Inquirer dug up some of the more interesting figures.

Basically, most businesses would love to have margins on their products like MS. Only the pharmaceutical companies are in the same league as MSFT.

Good job, Slashdot... This has only been covered at the Inquirer and Ace's for a couple of months. Some relevant articles can be had at Ace's here, there, and over yonder.

Look to the discussion forums for further analysis by competent folks.

Warning: Only hit the links if you're intelligent. The average mind need not apply.

The Inquirer has many articles about how the British and others routinely get shafted due to companies using exchange rates to their own advantage.

The Inquirer has many articles about how the British and others routinely get shafted due to companies using exchange rates to their own advantage.

The Inquirer has many articles about how the British and others routinely get shafted due to companies using exchange rates to their own advantage.

The Inquirer has many articles about how the British and others routinely get shafted due to companies using exchange rates to their own advantage.

The Inquirer has many articles about how the British and others routinely get shafted due to companies using exchange rates to their own advantage.

According to this article Half Life 2 has been translated into Russian, compiled, and is for sale on the shelves of a Russian trader in Novosibirsk.

Sack the sigs

Well spoken. It's nice to see some clear examples instead of "AMD sucks".

But, being the AMD fan I am, I must say that perhaps your problems are more due to bad luck than anything, since RMA rates for motherboards are significantly higher than other components.

And so this brings me to a question... is there a site that gives statistics on RMA rates?

- - - - - - - - - -

P.S. - The following riposte is a cut and paste of a previous slashdot post:

Pentium Floating-point division bug [ku.edu] (it's close enough, isn't it?)
Invalid Operand Instruction crashes original Pentiums [iss.net] Pentium crash codes
Pentium Pro/II still having problems with floats [ddj.com] Unable to convert to int
Pentium III can't even start up [bbc.co.uk] You went faster with an 8088
SSE is great for when you want your PIII to crash [zdnet.co.uk] Pretty blue screens abound.
PIII Xeon, quality you can count on, except at high CPU usage [macworld.com] Watch the task manager, Phil.
Yay, PIII MTH crashes! [com.com] Does MTH stand for Meth?
Total Recall 2: PIII@1.13GHz [com.com] Fastest crashes ever.
Total Recall 3: PIII Xeons@800/900Mhz [com.com] More Xeon quality in a box.
Total Recall 4: CC820 [techweb.com] How many defects? Can't recall...
Pentium 4 overwriting data [zdnet.co.uk] Hope it wasn't something important.
Pentium 4 chipset bug [com.com] Fast video performance? Naaa.
P4 Oracle/Sun problems [indiana.edu] More workarounds than work
Itanium shipments halted [theinquirer.net] That's an expensive oops.

Just so nobody gets any ideas that Intel is perfect...

Instead of spending $1400, how about assembling a case around a fanless Antec Phantom 350 power supply?

One of the most chunky pieces of metal was the Phantom 350, a fanless 350w power supply. Yes, you heard that right, a completely fanless power supply, for those into low noise PCs, this is the one for you. It combines the legendary Antec quality with high efficiency parts, and a massive, heavy, ribbed aluminum case. The entire case acts as a heatsink, and runs utterly silently. For $169 MSRP, it looks like quite a deal.

So I can get trapped inside my car? No thank you.

So there's pretty much no reason to go AMD.

According to the Inquirer, Valve released a patch in the middle of the event, and BAM! You can kiss all that bandwidth goodbye.

Notes is as critical to all IBM communication now as it has ever been, and even if everyone in IBM switches to Linux tomorrow, it still will be. Noone in my particular IBM lab would be able to function without it, and a number of us already run Linux as our primary desktop OS.

Then you might have missed this little gem of an article, linked from the original on the Inquirer:

IBM drops Lotus Notes inside

WE WERE IN SUCH a rush to file the story about IBM saying Linux was unstoppable that we missed out a piece of Deborah Magid's dialogue. Not only is Linux unstoppable, but IBM has abandoned using Lotus Notes inside the organisation because it's far too fat, said Deborah.

Okay, there wasn't a hell of a lot of content to the article. I'd like to know more, certainly. But if true, this points to removing a major obstable for IBM to adopt Linux on the desktop. Yes, you lucky IBMers that run Linux can run Notes under Wine, but why bother if IBM is going to stop using Notes internally?

Notes is a fat piece of software, I can say that much. I used to use Notes in two organizations (this, and my last one) and we converted away from it to open standards because the application was too fat. Gotta give this for Notes: if it hadn't been so damn big and slow, we might have continued using it for our bug tracking system, instead of trying out Bugzilla. We love Bugzilla!! :-)

Notes is as critical to all IBM communication now as it has ever been, and even if everyone in IBM switches to Linux tomorrow, it still will be. Noone in my particular IBM lab would be able to function without it, and a number of us already run Linux as our primary desktop OS.

Then you might have missed this little gem of an article, linked from the original on the Inquirer:

IBM drops Lotus Notes inside

WE WERE IN SUCH a rush to file the story about IBM saying Linux was unstoppable that we missed out a piece of Deborah Magid's dialogue. Not only is Linux unstoppable, but IBM has abandoned using Lotus Notes inside the organisation because it's far too fat, said Deborah.

Okay, there wasn't a hell of a lot of content to the article. I'd like to know more, certainly. But if true, this points to removing a major obstable for IBM to adopt Linux on the desktop. Yes, you lucky IBMers that run Linux can run Notes under Wine, but why bother if IBM is going to stop using Notes internally?

Notes is a fat piece of software, I can say that much. I used to use Notes in two organizations (this, and my last one) and we converted away from it to open standards because the application was too fat. Gotta give this for Notes: if it hadn't been so damn big and slow, we might have continued using it for our bug tracking system, instead of trying out Bugzilla. We love Bugzilla!! :-)

If there was a functional difference, I'd be glad to concede that HP was being completely, undeniably, 100% evil. However, all the searching I've done seems to indicate that the only difference between rv250 and rv280 is AGP8X support. Probably, ATI's product portfolio is assuming that the 9200 is faster when running under 8X (which it presumably is). That's irrelevent to the current issue.

I can see them trying, but I don't really see it. Hyperthreading as it is generates a lot of extra heat that isn't exactly proportional to the performance gain (I've noticed this on my own 2.8C). I know there are some dual Xeon systems that have hyperthreading enabled, so they must have partially addressed the problem the inquirer put as...

"An instruction thread might well favour one kind of execution unit, but who's to say the other threads, the ones that are running in parallel with the 'troublesome' one, won't be favouring the same execution units? Assume you've got two cores per die, and that's two threads running simultaneously. Chuck in Intel's much-touted HyperThreading technology and you'll have four threads being processed in parallel, two per core, all being 'hopped'. Chances are that at least two of them will be using the same execution units, so swapping them round isn't going to change anything."

But in a dual core system, heat is a much bigger problem, so it would make more sense to up the clock speed over enabling hyperthreading whereas the heat on a dual Xeon would be easier to eliminate because there are 2 processors with their own cooling solutions. There's also the issue that stardard operating systems don't support 4-way systems for residential computing. There's also the fact that Intel COO Paul Otellini said "We'll go from putting HyperThreading in our products to putting dual-core capability in our mainstream client processors over time." That implies that hyperthreading is used as a stepping stone for the consumer, as some programmers optimize their code to be run on hyperthreaded systems, it will also boost performance on future dual core systems. Anyone else have any ideas?

Her education is in classical history (Capellas discovered her love for the "Heloise and Abelhard" story the hard way).

During the merger, some Tru64 developers asked her about closing the NY development office and firing the engineers who ported the HP-UX kernel to the Itanium. She claimed that she had no knowledge of closing any facilities or firing any workers.

The "merger" of HP-UX and Tru64 can hardly be described as well-managed.

So we have a woman with no technical knowledge of HP, Compaq, or DEC enterprise systems who made the largest IT merger ever into a distorted castration fantasy.

Qualified? I think not.

Probably not, now that IBM is dumping Lotus Notes internally.

"Not only is Linux unstoppable, but IBM has abandoned using Lotus Notes inside the organisation because it's far too fat, said Deborah."

Uh apparently, you missed this which says IBM has already dumped notes because it sucks:

No more notes

Then Microsoft announced plans to make the data files of its flagship applications executable.

They were warned. Security experts warned that this crazy innovation would allow vandals to infect Word files and to infect e-mail.

Microsoft ignored the warnings. And it wasn't long before the first Word macro viruses were seen in the wild. But, in the end, the e-mail viruses, that raided your address book, turned out to be much more expensive.

Why?

Why would a corporation with the public interest at heart introduce a suite of programs with such a fundamental design flaw?

Some wise man counselled, "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." I used to think that this bad design could be explained by incompetence on Microsoft's executive floor.

About a year ago I started to wonder about this. Gates and Ballmer started talking about security. Palladium . The Trusted Computing Platform. When I read about these schemes I realized that the explanation for Microsoft's terrible design choices could be part of a deep game. Make the internet an insecure place in the mid nineties? Reap the rewards by getting your victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers to welcome allowing you draconian control over their computers in the mid 00s?

"you could simply shut down portions of the processor on-the-fly to save power. "

They might need it if there is any truth to this. From the article:

"Our motherboard contacts in Taiwan tell us... [that] motherboards they're designing for the middle of the year will support a not-so-cool 150 watts, just in case Intel gets a 3.8GHz Prescott out of the door."

150 watts? This NVRAM would have to shut down about half the CPU (not including L2) to keep the thing from burning a hole in the space-time continuum. If it's of any interest, roadmaps seem to indicate huge jumps in pin counts and die sizes for the P5s. What some have alluded to is an integrated memory controller, similar to AMD's, being integrated into the P5 chips, along with dual core support (just like AMD). The problem with sticking the NVRAM on top of the chip is price. Integrating a memory controller is a far cry in terms of production costs than sticking extras in later. Aside from that, if you're talking about an add-on, you run the risk of seeing huge latency numbers.

I think Intel needs to finally start focusing on CPU efficiency and instruction design. The MHz battle is long since over, and Intel is going to start slamming into some barriers that competitors won't see for quite a long time due to more efficient designs. What good is running a chip at 50GHz if 80% of those cycles are spent waiting for data to arrive due to relativity constraints? Unless Intel is prepared to integrate technology that takes advantage of quantum entanglement, they're not going to have a whole lot of success with their continuation of ramping up clock frequency.

Guess the Rumours are True.

Let's see...

For this month...

$top

13:04:33 up 30 days, 8:58, 0 users, load average: 0.36, 0.96, 0.60 Tasks, 131 total, 2 running 129 sleeping 0 stopped, 0 zombie.

About the only time wasted this month is getting OpenOffice.org to start. But that's when I go get something to drink, and it is usually running by the time I come back. And that should change for the better when I upgrade to the latest release whenever I decide to do that. I generally leave it running in the background when I'm using it frequently.

In fact, prior to the Microsoft blackout in the Northeast last summer, the uptime on my desktop was over 100 days. And I'm averaging about a month uptime now because I'm adjusting my configuration for other reasons and need to shut down about once a month.

How much time are you wasting solely on booting? Virus scanning? How much time virus scanning for the year? How much of your computer's resources are being used to run that virus scanner in the background? I've seen a few friends and former co-workers computers running virus scanning in the background. It isn't pretty. How much time cleaning out other computers in the family for viruses? How much $ are you wasting on the anti-virus protection racket every year?

After he left, THG retroactively edited authorship bylines on his articles. (his take) Not good journalism practice, and it was around this time when THG became very friendly to Intel and hostile to AMD.

The Inquirer isn't always trustable, one might say. For example, it posted an article about the Opera web browser, claiming that it was spyware. This is of course nonsense, and the author of the article never even did any research - he just jumped to conclusions. Opera was never even given a chance to respond to these false accusations. It was later half-way retracted.

It would have been OK if they had completely retracted the story without trying to wash their hands and come up with bad excuses, but their excuse was more of the "it wasn't really our falt" kind.

They even said that they contacted Opera's "PR company" to get a response (after the article was posted). Strange that, since Opera apparently handles its own PR. The "PR company" is part of Opera, and not a different company at all.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6582

Stop faking things like the contents of this post.

Cowards are just that. Why don't you go purchase a clue? Also check out the story here for references on Intel's quality control. You also might want to check out who's designing your new Intel chips (can you spell alpha moron). For a story related to that, check here then of course there is the denial that the alpha design has influenced Intel here

You may also want to check out sources like EEtimes, shannon knows DEC/Compaq/HP and of course the intel web site. BTW VMS is running on IA64 hardware. Do you know what VMS is little girl?

AngryPeopleRule

Stop faking things like the contents of this post.

Cowards are just that. Why don't you go purchase a clue? Also check out the story here for references on Intel's quality control. You also might want to check out who's designing your new Intel chips (can you spell alpha moron). For a story related to that, check here then of course there is the denial that the alpha design has influenced Intel here

You may also want to check out sources like EEtimes, shannon knows DEC/Compaq/HP and of course the intel web site. BTW VMS is running on IA64 hardware. Do you know what VMS is little girl?

AngryPeopleRule

Stop faking things like the contents of this post.

Cowards are just that. Why don't you go purchase a clue? Also check out the story here for references on Intel's quality control. You also might want to check out who's designing your new Intel chips (can you spell alpha moron). For a story related to that, check here then of course there is the denial that the alpha design has influenced Intel here

You may also want to check out sources like EEtimes, shannon knows DEC/Compaq/HP and of course the intel web site. BTW VMS is running on IA64 hardware. Do you know what VMS is little girl?

AngryPeopleRule

The G5 spanks the Opteron in many of the non-gaming tests, except for the Photoshop tests.

Isn't photoshop the reason for buying a mac?

And what about all those announcements?

Microsoft asks Mac users, "How can we get your business?'

Merrill Lynch, whose technology group recently began coverage of Red Hat, noted in a research note last week that "open source and Mac adoption is still in infancy in the enterprise market." However, "we should see explosive growth in the years to come as corporations look to achieve cost savings within their IT departments."

Using IDC's own estimate for G5/OSX server shipments through 2007, as well as its internal data on OSX operating system attach rates and server pricing, Merrill reckons that the enterprise G5 market could be worth $529 million by 2007. "This represents a [compound annual growth rate] of 61 percent over the 5-year period from 2002-2007," the note said.

Japanese telco to aid Mac phone development

Mac, G5 systems move out enterprise's mainframe

New G5 chips, but no 64-bit OS X for at least two years (too late).

"We're saying that OSX/G5s will eat Unix," Gantz said.

Is Computer Associates contemplating dumping Windows?

If you have been following Microsoft attempts to hold onto counties, cities, states, governmental bodies, governments, corporations and people, you know the headlines have gone from talk to action.

The governments that are starting to move over tend to be mostly poorer countries, or ones with large, largely computer-free populaces. Brazil and China are good examples of this trend. In those places, OSX/G5 adoption has been picking up steam to the point that if a second world country told MS to take a hike, it would hardly rate a Slashdot story on a slow day. .

THE NATIONAL HEALTH Service is considering using the OSX operating system & G5s in a 2.3 billion deal that could affect as many as 800,000 PCs if a pilot is successful.

Nine German cities poised to adopt OSX/G5

Official: China to invest in OSX/G5-based software industry

The US Army has abandoned Windows and chosen OSX for a key component of its "Land Warrior" programme, according to a report in National Defense Magazine. The move, initially covering a personal computing and communications device termed the Commander's Digital Assistant (CDA), follows the failure of the previous attempt at such a device in trials in February of this year, and is part of a move to make the device simpler and less breakable.

According to program manager Lt Col Dave Gallop this is part of a broader move towards OSX/G5 by the US Army: "Evidence shows that OSX is more stable. We are moving in general to where the Army is going, to OSX/G5-based OS."

Sun Microsystems is the odd man out. It has an impressive array of powerful enemies: IBM, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Red Hat, Apple, Novell, and more. It has only a weakened Oracle as a friend, and Oracle too has made a "bet the company" move to OSX/G5. OSX/G5 threatens many of Sun's traditional products as sharply a

The G5 spanks the Opteron in many of the non-gaming tests, except for the Photoshop tests.

Isn't photoshop the reason for buying a mac?

And what about all those announcements?

Microsoft asks Mac users, "How can we get your business?'

Merrill Lynch, whose technology group recently began coverage of Red Hat, noted in a research note last week that "open source and Mac adoption is still in infancy in the enterprise market." However, "we should see explosive growth in the years to come as corporations look to achieve cost savings within their IT departments."

Using IDC's own estimate for G5/OSX server shipments through 2007, as well as its internal data on OSX operating system attach rates and server pricing, Merrill reckons that the enterprise G5 market could be worth $529 million by 2007. "This represents a [compound annual growth rate] of 61 percent over the 5-year period from 2002-2007," the note said.

Japanese telco to aid Mac phone development

Mac, G5 systems move out enterprise's mainframe

New G5 chips, but no 64-bit OS X for at least two years (too late).

"We're saying that OSX/G5s will eat Unix," Gantz said.

Is Computer Associates contemplating dumping Windows?

If you have been following Microsoft attempts to hold onto counties, cities, states, governmental bodies, governments, corporations and people, you know the headlines have gone from talk to action.

The governments that are starting to move over tend to be mostly poorer countries, or ones with large, largely computer-free populaces. Brazil and China are good examples of this trend. In those places, OSX/G5 adoption has been picking up steam to the point that if a second world country told MS to take a hike, it would hardly rate a Slashdot story on a slow day. .

THE NATIONAL HEALTH Service is considering using the OSX operating system & G5s in a 2.3 billion deal that could affect as many as 800,000 PCs if a pilot is successful.

Nine German cities poised to adopt OSX/G5

Official: China to invest in OSX/G5-based software industry

The US Army has abandoned Windows and chosen OSX for a key component of its "Land Warrior" programme, according to a report in National Defense Magazine. The move, initially covering a personal computing and communications device termed the Commander's Digital Assistant (CDA), follows the failure of the previous attempt at such a device in trials in February of this year, and is part of a move to make the device simpler and less breakable.

According to program manager Lt Col Dave Gallop this is part of a broader move towards OSX/G5 by the US Army: "Evidence shows that OSX is more stable. We are moving in general to where the Army is going, to OSX/G5-based OS."

Sun Microsystems is the odd man out. It has an impressive array of powerful enemies: IBM, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Red Hat, Apple, Novell, and more. It has only a weakened Oracle as a friend, and Oracle too has made a "bet the company" move to OSX/G5. OSX/G5 threatens many of Sun's traditional products as sharply a

Companies like Intel, HP etc can make blunder after blunder but still come out on top as they have the resources to "wait" for the winner, and more importantly put a lot of resources behind the winner once invented.

Take Intel's Itanic, or the 860 this would have sunk any company but the very large. Intel's Yamhill is waiting in the wing in case The Custoenmrs want it How may companies can do that.

The Venture Capital stragegy centers around this Throw Mud on the wall and see what sticks and should more rightly be seen as Outsourced R&D that business start-up. FYI, More Start-ups get absorbed pre IPO than go public.