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The cost of duplication for an OS is almost $0 now.

Microsoft margins on Windows and Office are enormous. It's a clear indicator that they are still a monopoly.

The grand-daddy of them all was the unit responsible for Windows. It had costs of just $545 million but generated a profit of $2264 million, a staggering 415.4% profit on the money they put into it.

Let's put this in context. Dell's recent quarterly statement shows its margin at about 9%, which is a lower margin than even the least productive of Microsoft's profit-making groups. IBM's margin is similar to Dell's but HP's is about 6% in total, thanks mainly to printers, and Sun Microsystems is even lower.

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/11/16/microsofts-money-machine-revealed

Of course, it probably doesn't help MS that Vista isn't exactly setting the world on fire.

Actually I think the problem is that it is setting the world on fire, one latop at a time.

I think if IA-64 ever achieved the kind of volume the x86 market has, it would end up being a fine processor with lots of room for improvement still. It never really stood a chance: it was marketed as a server processor and Microsoft offerer only a half-assed support for it (it's their best interest to keep computers a commodity and they will fight any attempt to differentiate in that space). In addition, by the time it could be a viable high-power desktop workstation for developers or data-crunchers (a space it shines in) there was no Fedora or Ubuntu for it.

Instead, AMD came out with a set of extensions to the crufty x86 and that is what we use today. We would be much better if we started from a clean sheet.

And much, much better, if binary compatibility to x86 wasn't such a big issue.

None of that is true. Microsoft ported NT based kernels to Itanium (and spent vast amounts of time doing so because there are some subtle issues). Still since it was made by Intel it was pretty much guaranteed to get Windows support.

An Opteron 246 had about the same SpecInt as an Itanium 2 even when both were running native code.

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/11/05/amd-benchmarks-opteron-against--itanium-xeons-piiis

An Itanium was much slower running x86 binaries. Even the second generation run x86 binaries slowly

http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Itanium-loses-x86-hardware-support/0,339028227,339230300,00.htm

Microsoft Windows and major Linux versions include IA-32 EL. The emulation layer is considerably slower than a modern Xeon however: A 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processor runs emulated x86 instructions at about the same speed as a 1.5GHz Xeon processor, according to Intel.

At that point the fastest Xeon was much faster than 1.5Ghz

Opteron systems were much cheaper

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/57718-28-opteron-kill-itanium

and they tended to win on real world benchmarks

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/01/30FE64linux_3.html

Basically Itanium was a chance for a company with vast resources to start from scratch and it wasn't faster than x86. The Risc chips that NT supported actually had a better performance advantage, at one point up to 2x the SpecInt. And that wasn't enough to get people to bear the pain of switching over.

The fact is you can't judge computer architecture by aesthetic principles. x86 and x64 may look ugly but that is subjective. The thing that counts is performance and x86 has been beating competing architectures on SpecInt for ages.

Amd64 vs Ia64 was particularly dramatic. Intel had a huge financial advantage and at one point desktop Athlon 64s were the fastest processor in the world, beating far more expensive Ia64 server processors. It's the same now with Nehalem -

http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-i.html

it beats far more expensive non x86 chips, including ones from Intel.

Actually it wins on FP now, which is something that non x86 chips tended to do well at

http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-f.html

It's easy to say that it would be easy to start from a clean sheet, but Intel has tried that, poured money into it got the entire industry (including Microsoft) to announce transition plans from x86 to Ia64 and it still failed. Hell Ia64 isn't even that aesthetically pleasing, the more you look at it the more crufty it is.

The direct link to their numbers is here, including number for quad and dual CPUs. And here is the inquirer's take on it, which I tend to agree. This is about making sure that Win7 is put on as many machines as possible and doesn't have a "Vista Capable" debacle out of the gate. With this tech as long as they don't fuck up the CPU specs like they did with Vista(A 1GHz with 512Mb of RAM for Basic and 1Gb for all the others? WTF?) they should be able to give the Aero "experience" no matter how shitty of an Intel integrated GPU comes with your laptop. Of course it'll run so damned slow that the desktop will be pretty much the only thing you CAN run, but there won't be any more lawsuits because the machines can't run features. Anyway that is what I'm betting is going on in the mind of MSFT.

Personally I'll just be happy if Win7 doesn't run like a damned slug. because I'm really getting tired of playing "find a working driver" for all those damned laptops that keep getting dumped on my desk to be "downgraded" from Vista. I shudder to think how all those Best Buy and Wal Mart sub $600 laptops would have run if Vista would have had this "feature" at launch. How about making a nice lean functional OS instead of trying to out pretty Apple MSFT? Because frankly when you try to do Apple pretty you just end up sucking the big wet titty. Just accept the fact that you suck at pretty and move on. Win2K and WinXP weren't pretty and look at how much cash you made. Those of us that work with Windows will take compatibility and speed over pretty any day of the week. Just beg Allchin to come back and make backwards compatibility job #1 again and you'll find your customers will be happy.

You can't get a Core 2 CPU to run at 5Ghz no matter how hard you try.

Given that the Nehalem is reaching the same speeds or higher on air-cooling, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel could match 6 GHz under liquid nitrogen cooled conditions.

For most people, the decision is more likely to be based on the portability (battery life is getting pretty good for full laptops these days and places to plug them in more commonplace, so less of a concern). Netbooks are more portable, but they're still not exactly mobile phones. And at the same time, laptops are getting lighter.

Bulk, rather than weight, is also a factor.

I recently bought an Acer Aspire One. I get around by bike, and I found that my Laptop, a 13" MacBook + Brenthaven sleeve, was taking up most of the space in my pannier. A netbook, with no padded case, leaves a lot more room.

I think you're right about the UK price, but Linux netbooks are GBP 200-220 and I'm sure that competition, catalysed by AMD's entry, will drive the prices down over the next 12 months.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/11/13/canadian-sues-microsoft-billion

ASRock is not ASUS. Hua Ching, the subsidiary that was spun off from ASUS is not any longer a part of the ASUS organization. See http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2002/11/05/asus-distances-itself-from-asrock-subsidiary for details. There are a number of companies locally and elsewhere that have been pushing cheap ASRock mainboards as being the same quality as ASUS mainboards. We have seen many issues with the ASRock mainboards, both in premature failure and incompatibilities, that we have not seen at all in ASUS mainboards. ASUS has its own low-end set of mainboards and they are much better than the ASRock, from my experience. The sooner this sort of misinformation gets sorted out, the better informed the consumer will be.

Are we going to shell out $3,500 for a card that will fail after half a year, or did they correct the problem already?

How much does bandwidth actually cost for a major ISP? ... Imagine if the cable companies capped how much TV you could watch per month.

Less than $5.00 per month their cost, for what we would pay $50 or more for per month for. IMO $50 per month for 100MB / 100MB or .5 per Gig is too much. If only never-to-be-throttled 100MB / 100MB would be offered to us...

Of course 100 MB / 100 MB is not yet available to us here in the USA. But it is coming, and when it does watch out...

In Japan they have had, thanks to forced government de-regulation, 100MB / 100MB since 2000 for around $25 per month.

I liked this quote from the above link:

"Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace," said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT's senior manager for public relations.

I heard another Japanese telecom executive state that it cost them less than $5.00 to provide services to customers on a PBS show. You will not hear American executives telling American consumers that it costs them less than $5.00 per month. The American telecom executives on the show / panel had pained expressions on their faces. I am sure they are counting on their customers remaining oblivious to how much we are getting hurt by charging more for less; throttling services based on type of services; putting caps on services; etc....

If it costs less than $5.00 per month for a fiber link, than why is anyone, anywhere else in the world paying more for less. And once you learn of these facts, it really does make you mad when shills for the US cable and DSL companies come out complaining the opposite is true. I am sick of the lies and many innocent people jumping on the band wagon only because they are in the dark and do not know any better, WAKE UP please for all of our sakes.

Eventually there will be a company in your area offering uncapped, fiber-last-mile connection to your home, apartment, community and you will be able to thank your ISP for years of abuse by churning.

The more they piss off customers, the less sympathy any of us should have for them. I know I do not feel sorry for any of them. And marketing campaigns to buy American and get screwed will not work on me and many others either.

Now in Japan they are upgrading from 100MB / 100MB to 1GB / 1GB because their infrastructure, Fiber, will allow them to make this change simply by changing out the router on each end. Or if you already have a fiber router, just changing out the firmware in it. The expected cost for 1GB / 1Gb is expected to be less than $55.00 per month. Forum posts discussing the new technology; UK Inquirer article. I wish we had this available in the USA.

USA consumers should have had this back in 2000, perhaps as early as 1998 in some larger cities, definitely by 2003. Here it is 2008 and we still can't get service anywhere near 100MB / 100MB. Pathetic and definitely NOT FORGIVABLE! How many of you reading this understand that the telcos promised higher speeds and collected money for those promises that they reneged on?

We, the USA High Speed Internet consumer, have been getting screwed for years. Our only chance will be if government steps in as they did in Japan and forces the hands of the major telcos, cable companies and related telecommunications companies. Normally I am NOT for government regulation however, as Japan has proved and the US telcos have shown by their lack of keeping promises they made, in thi

On one hand the hardware is old and could probably use a revamp... on the other hand we did miss a few major bullets.

After all, NASA could have decided to run Windows ME with an Nvidia graphics card with an IBM Deskstar 75GXP

According to an Inquirer article, the estimates were about $10 billion.

I would think it would cost more than $10.8 billion to develop FC9 from scratch then...since it's a better OS.

True, but they have been countered by the ramblings of Jacqui Smith:

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/17/jacqui-smith-wants-facebook

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7671046.stm

I am trying to work out whether she is actually a fascist or if she is simply an idiot who has never looked at how the sort of things she is suggesting have worked out in history.

According to the Inquirer, the problem bump material was high lead, and the problem is being fixed by replacing the material with eutectic (i.e, mix of lead and tin) solder.

See for example this

So I don't think RoHS can really be at fault here.

Looks like the commenter that mentioned a possible link between low-lead and high-lead solder might be on to something, or the inquirer.net writer if he/you brought this possible issue to light.

I have a Toshiba A215-S7422 notebook that has video problems as well. Toshiba is covering it up and trying to run out the warranty. The screen "blanks" and the laptop freezes up. No system keys work, emergency syncing doesn't work, etc. But the cpu still is getting power because the air at the vent remains hot. The only solution when the problem hits is to hold down the start button till the lights go out and then release and hold down again for a cold reboot. I thought it was a Vista problem, but I'm dual booting Debian, and the problem appears with it too. I thought it might be a cpu throttling problem, so I forced the cpu (AMD TL-58) to stay at 800 MHz, then tried at full speed (1900 MHz) and in between. No difference. In Debian, I set up scripts to log temperature every minute, cpu speed, load, cpu utilization, etc., to see what the issue was after a lockup. No difference. Happens at any speed, any temp, any load, any cpu utilization, etc.

I was getting 20-30-40 day uptimes, but made the mistake of falling asleep with throttling turned off. Cpu ran at 1900 MHz for about 7 hours. After that, the uptimes are now a few days to a week being a really good uptime. Tried different kernels as well, all the way to 2.6.25, currently running at 2.6.24 because I think I may be getting slightly less uptime with 2.6.25. The laptop was put to emergency use running a very low hit count web site in Dec. 07 and has been performing that function since then up until now, so the laptop has been running 24/7 since then. It just freezes up, the power, logon, battery lights stay on like when it is running on ac power, and the ethernet port light remains lit, the ethernet termination at the switch remains lit as well. It just freezes up with a dark "blue" screen similar to when the screen blanks after inactivity if you don't use a screen saver.

Toshiba allegedly addressed this with a bios fix, acknowledging an "intermittent screen blanking issue". Prior to the bios fix, I was able to adjust how much system memory could be used for the video card in the bios during boot up. That ability was removed with the bios update. Now, whether during boot up phase, or directly entering bios, the ability to change amount of system ram for video has been removed. Toshiba admits this "intermittent screen blanking issue" for dozens and dozens and dozens of A215-Sxxxx and other Toshiba Axxx-xxxxx models, with the same or another bios version to fix the dozens and dozens and dozens of models that this affects. According to customer service, I should take it to a local authorized repair center. After a long conversation with the local authorized repair center manager (owner?), he admitted that the "fix" is for him to update the bios himself, which alters the throttling/cooling profiles in Vista. I described what I did to try and trace the problem and he admitted it was a bigger issue than Toshiba's "fix". He suggested sending the laptop back to Toshiba instead of taking it to him and follow up with them until the issue is resolved.

My warranty is up in the next couple of months and the reason for purchasing the laptop was to run the web site until I finally replace the "server" the web site(s) was/were running on. I'm also using the same laptop for personal use while its serving the sites, so I have a year's worth of personal info and web development work on it as well. I was able to back up months ago onto DVD disks, but now the data is quite a bit more. Every time I try to back up to a USB drive or over ethernet to the replacement "server", the laptop locks up. So for now my data is stuck on the laptop until I figure out how to get it off in between lockups so I can send the laptop back to Toshiba. Now if I could find the receipt for when it was purchased...

The Nvidia thing could be this...

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/10/apple-notebooks-defective

It's actually another useless article from The Inquirer, republished on pcauthority.com.au.

Sure, Home bears a glancing resemblance to Second Life, albeit a homogenized one, but the NXE bears absolutely no resemblance other than they both have avatars and feature text and voice chat. Virtual world, NXE ain't.

Where is slashdot's bullshit filter when we need it?

I don't know why they need such a big grid, according to the inquirer they only create about 15 Gigs of data each year. Whatever that means.

They were bad, but now I'm 100% sure that they are nothing but a big gig themselves, and I've removed them from my bookmarks.

Source:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/03/lhc-spews-15million-gb

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/02/norway-standards-members-walk

I was shocked by how excellent the "rough Google translation" was. Unless they had a human clean up the translation a bit, that is amazingly good English prose for a machine translator to emit. (I can't speak for how accurate it is, but it seems plausible enough.)

English is a mess, with lots of irregular usages. How about Norwegian -- is it particularly easy or particularly hard to translate?

steveha

Is it *too* much to ask that a technical news site present technical articles correctly?

Then there would be much less news.

Quote: "ICANN up in arms at Verisign DNS hijacking" (as happened 2003)

CC.

> The machines, rebranded 'Magellan,' will also come with Linux

I tracked down an attribution - with pictures of the device

"This is effectively a second-generation Classmate PC, and integrates a Celeron ULV part and uses Linux, although down the line it is expected to migrate to a fully Atom-based system with a "lighter version of Windows" (whatever that is)."

The Portuguese have also bought 500,000 of the same devices.

Mochasoft Iphone, Ipod app. violates GPL
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/22/mochasoft-allegedly-violating

In the end, they (i.e., Mochasoft) will be forced to publish the source code, which Apple does not appreciate too much with apps in the App Store. ;-)

When did MC Hammer become a restaurant? You do know that trademarks are industry-specific, right?

Yeah, tell that to M$ or any other bigcorp. You mean, they were industry-specific before the creation of the internet. But nowadays, their marks apply anywhere: the larger the company, the less they are hindered by their product being "in a different industry. See:

• UPS accuses Lakewood lawyer of infringing `Brown' trademark (over www.sambrownlaw.com)
• Firestone sues over trademark infringement
• M$ sues a dentist
• French television presenter sues M$ over the Vista name
• Intel sues disk jockey for diluting its trademark
• ESPN sues QuickSilver, Inc., Alleging trademark violation

How about reducing the need for AC POWER as well by cutting down on the number of AC TO DC PSU's.

Intel are backing that idea
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/09/26/intels-rattner-hails-you-tube-as-the-future

Can you do more? Sure, but you need to look at the whole power cycle, from the mains in to the building to the use in the individual computers. About 1/3 of the power that comes in the door ends up doing work, you have many AC -> AC, AC -> DC and DC -> AC transitions, each losing a bit here and there. Those bits end up byting you in the nibble, puns intended.

Intel then brought up one of the older single rail 90% efficient PSU and pointed it out that it was obsolete. Instead of all the transitions, you go to a direct high voltage DC power system. The savings went from 3800 or so watts to power a rack to about 3300W, or about a 15% power savings with that one change. I think someone took a trip to Rackable and noticed what they were doing.

They demo'd a high voltage DC server rack at Comdex.

I mean can you really force someone to not be able to just hid their SSID or mac filter or something?

Anyone can crack the 26-digit WEP key in minutes. From there, you can pick up SSIDs from association requests and snoop on the MAC that sends and receives each packet. Still, the use of WEP, hidden SSIDs, and MAC filtering keeps casual leeches out and establishes an attacker's intent to enter the network.

Never happened.

A quick google shows that the bill does indeed not prohibit MS software entirely, but it sounds like it does prohibit a pro-MS preference:

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/09/29/peru-rejects-microsoft-windows
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/perus-green-light-to-opensource-software/2005/09/28/1127804508352.html
http://news.cnet.com/Perus-president-approves-open-source-bill/2110-7344_3-5907226.html

And some older articles that sound a bit more extreme (like I remembered it):
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2002/07/54141
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/19/ms_in_peruvian_opensource_nightmare/

Besides the fact that the two are long time partners due to the nature of their respective business there is also this.

3 (yes, triple code do exist)

The only three core processors I know of are effectively defective quad core processors.

The 4th core is defective so, rather than disposing of them, they are sold as tri-core processors.

Whilst there's no requirement for base two, there is usually a requirement for an even number of cores in SMP (symmetric multi processing)

The last PC I had that had a slot for external cache was a 486. This was around 1994, and even then COAST modules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_on_a_stick were a little difficult to find -- It's not like you could just walk in to the local Futureshop and pick one up.

It will be good riddance to video cards if that functionality moves to the CPU as far as I'm concerned. Especially if Intel and AMD continue with their recent trend of developing open drivers for their chips. Unlike other companies in the market, who only release binary blob drivers and deny serious problems with their current generation of laptop graphics chips http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/09/nvidia-g84-g86-bad.

Not surprised. McCain's made no secret of his desire to have Steve Ballmer in his cabinet. Ballmer himself probably put those words right in McCain's mouth

Product Placement reaches new lows

Not surprised. McCain's made no secret of his desire to have Steve Ballmer in his cabinet. Ballmer himself probably put those words right in McCain's mouth

MACs can be spoofed easily, and WEP is broken.

If a hungry tiger is chasing you and another explorer, you don't have to outrun the tiger, just the other explorer.

Some devices, such as the Nintendo DS handheld computer, will never be upgraded to work with WPA. If you have legacy devices on your network, the point isn't perfect security as much as "good enough" security. A wardriver confronted with SSID Foo with WEP + MAC whitelisting and SSID Baz with no access control at all will try to connect to Baz before Foo. True, a few minutes of logging WEP packets can result in connecting to your network much of the time, but so can a few minutes of breaking and entering. If you can prove that a wardriver targeted you, you might be able to take him to small claims court for "theft" of service.

No airtight DRM is possible (and Spore's already been cracked). But content producers are so obsessed with absolute control that they'll beg people to take money to sell them snake oil. Of course, this always works. Yeah.

Others speculate the real target of game DRM is to kill the second-hand market. But, of course, that does no good when the competition is the cracked copies. Piracy: The Better Choice.

called.

VMWare's corporate owner decided to turn it into a conforming, completely not distinct, part of their bureacracy, and the founder/CEO of VMWare quit ( or Was Gotten Rid Of ), for insisting that VMWare required focus, management devoted to *its* function and survival in *its* market...

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/09/emc-sacks-vmware-ceo-takes

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/vmware-shares-hit-competition-executive/story.aspx?guid={07369773-A431-4E60-9BE7-BFEE779EFD32}&dist=TQP_Mod_mktwN

Notice that competition is heating up ( Microsoft is committed to eradicating 'em ), and their overlord is committed to preventing them from having the autonomy to survive...

One thing that is consistent: if a company has focus on what it's doing, it can endure.

If it hasn't, because it does too many things, in too many directions, its profitability dies, then it starts doing the slash and burn style of management, then customer support goes to hell, then the spend time and resources taking their chunk of the market down with them.

( anyone here remember the cost of going with Caldera? )

Ah, not VBox, but VirtualBOX, I think.

If you never shut off the machine would you be safe from this?

Doubtful.
From: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/01/why-nvidia-chips-defective

"Modern chips consume electricity in an uneven manner, as different parts of the chip use power at different rates. Sometimes parts of the chip are never used at all for a given workload. If you have a modern GPU and don't game or are smart enough to not run Vista, you will likely never touch the transistors that do all the 3D work. Think about it this way, there are hot spots on the chip as well as cold spots, it is uneven and changing constantly."

...with their Glaze3D line of video cards.

Oh, waitminute.... ATI bought out that vaporware outfit too!

Dang, now I'll never get a graphics card good enough to run DNF upon.

the inquirer http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/01/why-nvidia-chips-defective had a good summary series on what's bad.
In short, it's the connection of the chip to the board. You have minute metal connections providing current and data transport from the physical chip to the rest of the computer. The choice of material for these connection was poor, and so was the choice of glue holding the chip and the substrate together (and ideally protecting the metal connects from undue stress).
The main indicator for a serious flaw was the drastic changes NVIDIA made to their chip mounting design after the flaw was admitted - it was the kind of changes you normally don't do in the middle of a production run, and if you only do them after very careful testing.

which specific chips are effected?

No one knows for sure, and Nvidia isn't telling. The Inquirer says practically all of them, but their author has a history with Nvidia so there's quite a potential for bias there. The running theory is that the problem is due to thermal properties of a substrate material. This substrate material supposedly expands and contracts at a different rate than surrounding material in the chip package. Over time, this stresses the silicon or solder points, eventually causing a failure of the part. Laptop parts are definitely affected, you only need to look in notebook manufacturers forums and you'll see an incredible number of posts from owner of notebooks with, for example, 8600 GT mobile parts.

Desktop parts may also be affected, since they're all based on the same core silicon with (supposedly) the same substrate materials. It's possible that the problems aren't as apparent (at least not yet) due to the different thermal conditions you'd see in a tower chassis compared to a notebook. The very popular 8800GTs out there may start failing en masse in three months, six months, a year's time, or maybe never. Because Nvidia won't specifically say which parts are affected, whether it's all the parts or only certain manufacturing runs, etc., we have only speculation and rumor to go on.

which specific chips are effected?

No one knows for sure, and Nvidia isn't telling. The Inquirer says practically all of them, but their author has a history with Nvidia so there's quite a potential for bias there. The running theory is that the problem is due to thermal properties of a substrate material. This substrate material supposedly expands and contracts at a different rate than surrounding material in the chip package. Over time, this stresses the silicon or solder points, eventually causing a failure of the part. Laptop parts are definitely affected, you only need to look in notebook manufacturers forums and you'll see an incredible number of posts from owner of notebooks with, for example, 8600 GT mobile parts.

Desktop parts may also be affected, since they're all based on the same core silicon with (supposedly) the same substrate materials. It's possible that the problems aren't as apparent (at least not yet) due to the different thermal conditions you'd see in a tower chassis compared to a notebook. The very popular 8800GTs out there may start failing en masse in three months, six months, a year's time, or maybe never. Because Nvidia won't specifically say which parts are affected, whether it's all the parts or only certain manufacturing runs, etc., we have only speculation and rumor to go on.

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/08/20/att-contract-is-ruled-unconscionable

Maybe Comcast also got hosed. Likely.

Oh look, we're both right.

First hit from google.

http://consumerist.com/consumer/class-action/comcasts-class-action-waiver-ruled-unconscionable-297653.php :-D

--
BMO

Then again, since doing the right thing would likely bankrupt them, we wouldn't hold your breath for it to happen.

At that link, you'll find The Inquirer's (however flimsy and speculative) financial analysis of a full-scale Nvidia recall of the bad parts.

The Inquirer doesn't and has never claimed to be a fair and balanced news source, so they are free to put these sorts of quips on their stories. People there are pretty knowledgeable, and appear to have connections and sources in the industry, which is why people keep reading The Inquirer and don't really complain about stuff like that.

Then again, since doing the right thing would likely bankrupt them, we wouldn't hold your breath for it to happen.

At that link, you'll find The Inquirer's (however flimsy and speculative) financial analysis of a full-scale Nvidia recall of the bad parts.

The Inquirer doesn't and has never claimed to be a fair and balanced news source, so they are free to put these sorts of quips on their stories. People there are pretty knowledgeable, and appear to have connections and sources in the industry, which is why people keep reading The Inquirer and don't really complain about stuff like that.

Then again, since doing the right thing would likely bankrupt them, we wouldn't hold your breath for it to happen.

At that link, you'll find The Inquirer's (however flimsy and speculative) financial analysis of a full-scale Nvidia recall of the bad parts.

The Inquirer doesn't and has never claimed to be a fair and balanced news source, so they are free to put these sorts of quips on their stories. People there are pretty knowledgeable, and appear to have connections and sources in the industry, which is why people keep reading The Inquirer and don't really complain about stuff like that.

My VP-6 w/ 2x 1Ghz PIII is still my main home PC. My board fortunately seems to have dodged the stolen-formula Taiwanese capacitor problem that plagued Abit and others around 1999/2000 and led to a class action suit and settlement.

Oh yes, driving away the freeloaders is a big risk for M$. How many illegal copies of windows XP do you think there are in the world? Now imagine if they all ran Linux instead.

I saw a report recently that said the percentage of PCs with Linux pre-installed was 28 times what it was when vista first shipped. The actual 28 times figure is unimportant, it's more like 14 or 9 times if you look at the months before vista's release, but the actual market share is the important part. That's up to 2.8%, which is comparable to Apple's share.

What does that mean? Apple's share may not be big, but it's big enough to draw developers like Adobe. When you consider the potential that many of the machines with XP/Vista pre-installed will have been dual-booted to Linux, I'd expect the percentage of new computers with Linux to beat the percentage of new Macs hands-down.

There are still a lot of computers out there from past years, however, mostly running Windows XP. They'll probably be jumping to either Vista or Linux and, however much WGA they throw at the situation, they can't afford for them to jump to Linux even if it means making Vista easier to pirate, like by removing the reduced-functionality "kill switch" as they did in SP1.

But the bulk of that figure for Spanish is made up of people living in Latin America, where studies suggest only a relatively small percentage of the population uses the internet. Cuba has only recently begun allowing PCs in private homes. Some countries in Latin America have less than 3% of the population using the internet; Germany has over 40% (Data refers to years 2004-06; Source) Personal computer ownership per 100 is generally much lower than internet usage per 100 in Latin America, suggesting that this is also a market that can't necessarily choose which software is installed on the computers used.

So, in terms of numbers there are certainly more Spanish-speakers out there using the internet, but a lot of them are in situations where internet usage is rationed and/or not entirely under the user's control. In contrast, Germany has a high rate of internet usage and a high take-up of Firefox - and most users are probably using their own machines, not internet cafes or the like. The figures don't, at first, seem to make sense, but when you take into account the low rates of internet usage and computer ownership in the majority of Spanish-speaking countries, it begins to seem less anomalous.

RM might be bad, but MS are far worse. They (in the UK will charge schools for installing linux[1]. They, on anti-competitive grounds wont let people know how much MS in schools costs [2]

"This relates to circumstances where schools using Microsoftâ(TM)s School Agreement licensing model, are required to pay Microsoft licensing fees for computers based on Linux, or using OpenOffice.org. Finding ourselves in a position whereby a school pays (say) £169 for a device only to be faced with for example a £30 per year after year payment to Microsoft, for a system that is not running any of their software would just not be acceptable to Becta. Indeed I donâ(TM)t think many people would consider that fair. "

[1] http://www.siriusit.co.uk/myblog/microsoft-tax-on-linux-in-schools-must-end-says-becta.html

[2] http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/08/microsoft-gags-uk-schools

1) Wealthy Mexicans get chipped to either foil kidnappers or buy latest trendy toy.

2) Wealthy Mexicans get cancer from chips
    (RFID chips cause cancer, http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/09/11/rfid-chips-cause-cancer )
3) Wealthy Mexicans die, allowing the Mexican Gov't to tax estates of now deceased wealthy Mexicans

4) Government Profit!
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So... when do we get to chip the whole damn Walmart/Walton family?

The personal computer really isn't a toaster (yet).

I run NetBSD, you insensitive clod!

And last week The Inquirer reported that nvidia was getting out of the chipset business.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/08/02/nvidia-chipsets-dead

So according to the inquirer nvidia is getting out of the chipset business, but is going to produces an x86 processor. I guess they'll have to hook up to an intel chipset...

For some reason I do not believe what the inquirer is writing...