Well, you might want to consider that the obvious strategy for MS to recapture marketshare is to give huge custumors a sweet deal - in other words dumping the prices.
I have heard of several cases (all off the record, obviously) where MS has done just that. Wouldn't you consider switching if you were offered free (or almost free) licenses for all software in the MS catalog?
IMHO we are seeing the first signs of MS fighting back in the back office segment in ernest. This is not going to be pretty...
Well, this issue is addressed on his CML2 page, which is linked in the top level article. One feature of Python is the ability to generate C source code that implements your program, thus making it possible to distribute CML2 without Python.
Dan is definitely not a slow writer. However he lacks a publisher AFAIK. So... if want to see the rest of the Continuing Time series, you'd better start lobbying.
Well, his books have just been releasen in a limited edition by QuietVision. If you want to see a trade paperback at a somewhat more affordable price, please don't hesitate to write them.
A little known fact is that Dan actually finished two additional books in the series (Lord November and The AI War), but they are still unpublished. His relationship with the publishing houses has aparently been somewhat turbulent, but from his musings on the mailinglist I sense that he would still like to see them published some day. Wether he is still interested in actually finishing the series still remains to be seen, but i'm hoping he will - some day.
And yes, his books are still just as good as the first time I read them. Dynamite!
In Denmark we have had a National ID for decades. It's on the form ddmmyy-xxxx. The whole number has to pass a modulo check... *IF* it's a "normal" ID. Unfortunately immigrants etc. are assigned temporary ID numbers, which may change if they are ever given full citizenship and which do not have to satisfy the modulo check.
Guess what? A lot of programs both use the national ID as primary key, and refuse to accept an ID that doesn't pass the modulo check in order to avoid input errors. So it your ID does not pass the modulo check, you're SOL...
Another common error is programs that extract date of birth from the ID number. It always comes as a surprise to programmers when they realise that there are actually people living today, who were born back in the 1800's. At least one may hope that this kind of bug won't be incorporated in most current software, as the same problem occurs right now for all newborns.
Nothing wrong with the system really - only a lot of programmers never took the time to actually bone up on the rules and quirks of the ID number system.
Nope. Danish. My use af US-English ideom tends to be a little mixed-up:)
BTW. this is quite normal here. You'd probably be shocked and surprised at the amount of US profanity used here. Example: 7-11 recently got a notice from the public office charged with monitoring advertisement. They had put commercials on public busses with this slogan: "Fuck the sundays closing hours" (yes, using the F word). The reason for the notice was not, as you'd might expect, the prominent use of profanity, but the inherent message of wanton disrespect of the law:)
Took it once, and noticed that one of the cokes was just a tad colder than the other one. Sure enough it turned out to be the Pepsi, that was the cold coke, and therefor the most refreshing one on that warm summers day:)
BTW it didn't disguise the taste, and as a true "real coke" lover I chose the "other coke"...
You seem to be forgetting three rather old social and legal structures, that in most respects have the same attributes that you ascribe to corporations:
The church
The monarchy and aristochracy
The state
At least in my countrys history (Denmark) the imortallity of these entities have had a profound effect on the political and personal lives of the citizens. This is particulairy the case for the church. One of the main reasons that the Danish king abolished catolisicm in favour of protestantism was that the church had ammased immense power and wealth through (mostly deathbed) donations of money and (more important) land. The land belonging to the crown and the aritocracy was slowly eroded away, as it was split up and inherited by the younger sons - who in some cases donated it to the church in order to improve their standing in the hereafter:)
At some point this led to the royalty and aristocrats joining forces, and neutering the church. This may happen to corporations too, if they get too powerfull. The current anti-trust laws are an indication that the political leadership of ANY country will never concede power to another entity.
...this is a very useful thing, and a big breakthrough.
Quite a few persons suffer from disabilities, that have ribbed them of their voice, and possibly other modes of expression. For these people the digitized or synthetisized voice pretty much becomes their primary way of presenting themselves to the world (think Stephen Hawking). Until now the choice was basically between a digitized voice (high quality output, but limited vocabulary and limited choice in voice types) and synthesized voice (low quality output, but unlimited vocabulary). A synthesized voice with realistic characteristics would be the best of both worlds.
Hmm... Nokia has managed to make a lot of money developing, producing, marketing and selling mobile phones. Modern GSM phones are pretty advanced, allthough admittedly not equal to a modern console. Pretty close, though.
If anyone is able to make money mass-producing a piece of consumer electronics targetted at the mass market, Nokia would be it:)
Remember back when the PS1 came out? I for one was a bit surprised to see Sony release a console, but in 20/20 hindsight it made a lot of sense. They had the experience in producing consumer electronics, and - perhaps more important - marketing it, and getting it out in the stores. A well established brand name certaintly didn't hurt either. Honestly: Did any of you expect Sony to become a major player in the console market, eventually pushing Sega out?
Now consider Nokia. They have a lot of experience designing, producing, marketing and selling consumer electronics in this price range. In fact, they are just about the only major mobile phone manufacturer that has managed to make a profit in the last year, and - let's be honest - it's not because their phones are technologically superior to the phones from - say - Erichson.
The only catch is that the mobile phone market - at least GSM phones - is just about saturated. In Scandinavia, where we have consistently been a few years ahead of the rest of the world in the mobile phone market, almost everyone, including 12 year old school kids, now have a GSM phone.
So far it has seemed like Nokia would gamble on 3G making people switch phones and convergence in PDAs and phones as their future market, but actually a console would make a lot of sense as an alternative revenue stream.
People buy phones for much the same reasons that they buy consoles. Think about it. It's not all about capabillities - it's about design and marketing.
You may laugh, but I distinctly remember reading a cyberpunk-whodunnit in a brit computer mag back in the early 80'ies, which featured a 1GHz CPU as a cheap comodity. Boy was I convinced that it was over the top... At that time I had a 4MHz Z80-based Sinclair Spectrum with 64K's of RAM. Yup, that included display memory.
If you read your stats, you'll notice that bandwith price/performance ratio is improving at an even faster rate than CPU price/performance - the jumps in performance are bigger, but spaced farther in time than CPU performance jumps.
So bandwith is cheap, and getting cheaper. The only true barrier is latency. After all, increasing bandwidth is (basically) just a matter of bundeling more fibers pr. connection:)
Quite a few tech journalists follow/. these days. Well at least the cluefull ones:)
And yes, I'll write about it. You bet! It's a great little news item - just the thing to bring people hope. Right about now "ordinary people" (read: your mom and dad) are waking up to the ugly reality of spam, and want to know jut how to deal with it.
Now I may sound like an old fart - which I guess I am at 30 - but from you comments it seems that most of you have a lot to learn about business in general and software publishing in particular.
I see a lot of misconceptions here, so let's start with the biggest one right away:
It seems that most of the people commenting on the story think that the "idea" is the main thing in getting a software company up and running. Not so! As a rule of thumb, the idea is 5% of the program. The program is 5% of the product. The product is 5% of the company. In other words: While it's certaintly true that without the idea there would be no company, it's AT LEAST as true to say that without a lot of (non-idea and programming related) work there would be no company either.
Coders tend to underestimate the importance of the supporting organization and the networking involved in getting a product to the shelves, not to mention selling it once it's in the stores. It's true that a lot of barriers have fallen in this area over the last years, but the main part of the job is still to get the software ready for the market, and actually getting it TO the market. In other words you (OK, we) tend to overestimate the value of ideas.
In the area of ideas: You do NOT need a brilliant idea (although it won't hurt). You need a good idea and a good plan. Without a plan you'll get exactly nowhere. Have you thought about distribution? PR? User segments? Competition? You NEED to think about those things, in order to find a way to package your IP in a product that will actually stand a chance of making money.
The last major misconception is in the area of the nature of business deals. It seems that a lot of people are outraged that he got "screwed over". Well guess what: People do not do business in order to be nice to eachother! They are out there to make money, and if you do not make sure that your ass is covered, the easiest way to make money will be to "screw you over". That would be your fault for not getting a good lawyer to check out the contract before you signed it, and not their fault for being evil capitalists. If you don't want to deal with capitalists, don't invite them in. If you don't want to deal with them, and your product needs financing to take off, your plan wasn't good enough:) In that case, bite the bullit and cross your fingers, 'cause there's no way to make sure that they can't screw you over somehow.
Finally you absolutely have to quit your day job in order to give your own idea the 110% attention it needs in order to become a moneymaker. You can NOT expect to make a fortune in your spare time. Actually your prospective investors expect that you spend at least half a year working on your idea ON YOUR OWN DIME... If you don't, well then you haven't shown sufficient confidence in your own ideas, right? They supply the resources, but you have to make them bellieve in you somehow.
To sum it up: Don't bitch - learn about the facts of business before you try to play in the big (or middle) leagues. Unfortunately the only reliable way to learn about business it to try it, so expect to get burnt once or twice. But it's no big deal.... You'll learn, and eventually (hopefully) you'll bag the big one some day.
Just don't count on doing it through amazing code alone, or expect that the venture capitalists are in the fairy godmother business.
Re:Someone should combine that with clothes..
on
Plastic Valley?
·
· Score: 2
"I'd like to return this underwear"
"Why certaintly sir. May I inquire as to why you are dissatisfied?"
I am part of a research project at the IT University of Copenhagen, where we design eye controlled communication aids for disabled persons. We are currently working towards doing a low-resolution - but cheap - solution based on webcams, which then interfaces to a communication program. Out goal, which seems to be within reach, is to acchieve a entry speed of approx. 60 chars pr. minute, using a mix of eye control and prediction functions. My job is adapting my commercial communication program for eye tracking.
And yes, this is great technology, but with quite a few limitations, which aren't all obvious. First and foremost is the problem that eye movements aren't 100% conciously controlled. Your eyes allways jitter slightly, and you have a tendency to track events outside the sceen with your eyes. The canonic illustration we use in discussions is, that you certaintly don't want the program to print your text, just because a bird flying close by your windows startled you, and made you look.
Second is the whole problem of when you "click". Dwell-time is quite popular, but has the drawback of not making you feel in controll, and leaving you all too often without a "safe harbour" on the screen. Using a "long blink" for clicking is a better option, but leaves you with another problem - distinguishing a shadow falling on the camera from a closed eye. Thus we often fall back on using a secondary device for clicking and doubleclicking.
Last is the whole issue of precision. Eye tracking today is rather unprecise, even under optimal conditions and with expensive "best of breed" equipment. As a rule of thumb, you shouldn't expect to be able to activate a button smaller than one square inch with any kind of precision, especially using dwell time for clicking.
So there you have it. Eye tracking certaintly is a usefull tool, but - for now - is rather far from the ultimate goal of direct mind interface to the computer. Actually it's a problem that eye controll sounds so fantastic, as it jacks the level of expectation from the users far too high for the state of the art. Right now you need specialized programs, and a lot of design effort to make the experience a good one - even under optimal conditions.
So... What does "Say to thorin 'carry me'|say to thorin 'go window'|se|e|se|e|get ring|n|d|n|go crack" do, and/or where should the commands be entered?
Please please please answer - the curiousity is KILLING me!
We used to have a kernel writing assignment on the second year, which by now (I think) has devolved to implementing features of a kernel like scheduler and drivers for units. For those of you who understand Danish (yeah - right) the link to the relevant page is here.
Now back in the old days of '91 when I took the course, we actually implemented a whole kernel in 68000 assembler on old eurocard-based Motorola machines named after dead greek philosophers... but those machines have by now sadly passed away. One was auctioned off as parts at a party, one went to the internal museum of ancient computer parts and one was used as the Danish analog to a piñata at our local analog to Halloween:)
I guess it's time to join the whining, and point out that the original attempt at making Dune into a movie would have kicked the ultimate ass.
At this page you can read all about the failed attempt that Alejandro Jodorowsky, Gieger and Moebius made way back when. Oh well... Since it never actually happened, it will always be perfect in our imagination I guess:)
Not to be a nitpicker, but... OK - to be a nitpicker:
Sure, if you could get latency for free. Only you can't. We are beyond the point where anything but perhaps general improvement in gate switching is an unballanced good. This is the same thing as trying to decide the optimum cache-line length. This is a function of many variables, and can't be decided in an isolated fashion.
Actually what I was saying implicitly in the original post was that the latency gap between CPU and memory is growing, so you'll have to optimize for either lower latency gap (= better caching, slower clock, smaller latency-gap) or higher clock (=simpler caching, higher IPC in core, larger latency-gap, longer cache-lines). If you go for higher clock, you want to optimize for bandwith, as this is more or less the only option.
RAMBUS is generally higher bandwith/higher latency than normal DRAM. There really isn't much we can do about the latency-gap, except perhaps going for avanced RAM architectures w. more intelligence in rows, or even individual cells, which costs transistors, which reduces storage capacity etc. etc.
That, or a whole new way of fabbing chips and/or memory. There a quite a few promising alternatives out there, memory-wise, but they are all experimental, so don't wait up:) Personally I'm hoping for a breakthrough in holographic storage, which should up the bandwith something wonderfully.
A lot of people here seem quite confused about why Intel has designed the P4 the way they did. I'll tell you why:
It's *all* about the memory bandwith
The gap in MHz between CPU and memory is growing, and has been growing for quite some time. Remember when you could still get 0-wait-state computers? That's a looong time ago now. Currently it's the memory subsystem (including caches) that is throtteling chip performance
Now: When you ramp up chip speed, you usually have to compromise on both cache size, and cache complexity. This is why a lot of chips (say the Alpha design) has direct-mapped level 1 cache, instead of n-way associative. Note that the P4 has smaller L1 cache than the P3.
So what can you do? If you want to design an architecture that will last for years, and possibly ramp to approximately 10GHz, you focus on getting the memory subsystem right first. You might even sacrifice performance pr. clock at "low" clocspeeds (by todays standards, that is), in order to insure that the basic design will last you a nice, long product cycle.
Thus the P4: Great memory bandwith, but less impressive performance pr. clock. Supporting evidence: Note that all large minis and supercomputers have really really REALLY exotic memory busses, focused on extreme throughput. We'll see more of this. Trust me!
Slashdot Mirror
I have heard of several cases (all off the record, obviously) where MS has done just that. Wouldn't you consider switching if you were offered free (or almost free) licenses for all software in the MS catalog?
IMHO we are seeing the first signs of MS fighting back in the back office segment in ernest. This is not going to be pretty...
Nonononono! No!
T3: Arnold IS John Connor!
"Search your feelings John. You know this to be true!"
...or a spin doctor? :D
Well, this issue is addressed on his CML2 page, which is linked in the top level article. One feature of Python is the ability to generate C source code that implements your program, thus making it possible to distribute CML2 without Python.
Dan is definitely not a slow writer. However he lacks a publisher AFAIK. So... if want to see the rest of the Continuing Time series, you'd better start lobbying.
A little known fact is that Dan actually finished two additional books in the series (Lord November and The AI War), but they are still unpublished. His relationship with the publishing houses has aparently been somewhat turbulent, but from his musings on the mailinglist I sense that he would still like to see them published some day. Wether he is still interested in actually finishing the series still remains to be seen, but i'm hoping he will - some day.
And yes, his books are still just as good as the first time I read them. Dynamite!
In Denmark we have had a National ID for decades. It's on the form ddmmyy-xxxx. The whole number has to pass a modulo check... *IF* it's a "normal" ID. Unfortunately immigrants etc. are assigned temporary ID numbers, which may change if they are ever given full citizenship and which do not have to satisfy the modulo check.
Guess what? A lot of programs both use the national ID as primary key, and refuse to accept an ID that doesn't pass the modulo check in order to avoid input errors. So it your ID does not pass the modulo check, you're SOL...
Another common error is programs that extract date of birth from the ID number. It always comes as a surprise to programmers when they realise that there are actually people living today, who were born back in the 1800's. At least one may hope that this kind of bug won't be incorporated in most current software, as the same problem occurs right now for all newborns.
Nothing wrong with the system really - only a lot of programmers never took the time to actually bone up on the rules and quirks of the ID number system.
BTW. this is quite normal here. You'd probably be shocked and surprised at the amount of US profanity used here. Example: 7-11 recently got a notice from the public office charged with monitoring advertisement. They had put commercials on public busses with this slogan: "Fuck the sundays closing hours" (yes, using the F word). The reason for the notice was not, as you'd might expect, the prominent use of profanity, but the inherent message of wanton disrespect of the law
Took it once, and noticed that one of the cokes was just a tad colder than the other one. Sure enough it turned out to be the Pepsi, that was the cold coke, and therefor the most refreshing one on that warm summers day
BTW it didn't disguise the taste, and as a true "real coke" lover I chose the "other coke"...
The church
The monarchy and aristochracy
The state
At least in my countrys history (Denmark) the imortallity of these entities have had a profound effect on the political and personal lives of the citizens. This is particulairy the case for the church. One of the main reasons that the Danish king abolished catolisicm in favour of protestantism was that the church had ammased immense power and wealth through (mostly deathbed) donations of money and (more important) land. The land belonging to the crown and the aritocracy was slowly eroded away, as it was split up and inherited by the younger sons - who in some cases donated it to the church in order to improve their standing in the hereafter
At some point this led to the royalty and aristocrats joining forces, and neutering the church. This may happen to corporations too, if they get too powerfull. The current anti-trust laws are an indication that the political leadership of ANY country will never concede power to another entity.
Quite a few persons suffer from disabilities, that have ribbed them of their voice, and possibly other modes of expression. For these people the digitized or synthetisized voice pretty much becomes their primary way of presenting themselves to the world (think Stephen Hawking). Until now the choice was basically between a digitized voice (high quality output, but limited vocabulary and limited choice in voice types) and synthesized voice (low quality output, but unlimited vocabulary). A synthesized voice with realistic characteristics would be the best of both worlds.
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" more or less covers this situation. The topic is the first lunar revolution, and it's consequences. A classic read.
If anyone is able to make money mass-producing a piece of consumer electronics targetted at the mass market, Nokia would be it
Remember back when the PS1 came out? I for one was a bit surprised to see Sony release a console, but in 20/20 hindsight it made a lot of sense. They had the experience in producing consumer electronics, and - perhaps more important - marketing it, and getting it out in the stores. A well established brand name certaintly didn't hurt either. Honestly: Did any of you expect Sony to become a major player in the console market, eventually pushing Sega out?
Now consider Nokia. They have a lot of experience designing, producing, marketing and selling consumer electronics in this price range. In fact, they are just about the only major mobile phone manufacturer that has managed to make a profit in the last year, and - let's be honest - it's not because their phones are technologically superior to the phones from - say - Erichson.
The only catch is that the mobile phone market - at least GSM phones - is just about saturated. In Scandinavia, where we have consistently been a few years ahead of the rest of the world in the mobile phone market, almost everyone, including 12 year old school kids, now have a GSM phone.
So far it has seemed like Nokia would gamble on 3G making people switch phones and convergence in PDAs and phones as their future market, but actually a console would make a lot of sense as an alternative revenue stream.
People buy phones for much the same reasons that they buy consoles. Think about it. It's not all about capabillities - it's about design and marketing.
If you read your stats, you'll notice that bandwith price/performance ratio is improving at an even faster rate than CPU price/performance - the jumps in performance are bigger, but spaced farther in time than CPU performance jumps.
So bandwith is cheap, and getting cheaper. The only true barrier is latency. After all, increasing bandwidth is (basically) just a matter of bundeling more fibers pr. connection
And yes, I'll write about it. You bet! It's a great little news item - just the thing to bring people hope. Right about now "ordinary people" (read: your mom and dad) are waking up to the ugly reality of spam, and want to know jut how to deal with it.
dduck
Tech Journalist, Denmark
Now I may sound like an old fart - which I guess I am at 30 - but from you comments it seems that most of you have a lot to learn about business in general and software publishing in particular.
I see a lot of misconceptions here, so let's start with the biggest one right away:
It seems that most of the people commenting on the story think that the "idea" is the main thing in getting a software company up and running. Not so! As a rule of thumb, the idea is 5% of the program. The program is 5% of the product. The product is 5% of the company. In other words: While it's certaintly true that without the idea there would be no company, it's AT LEAST as true to say that without a lot of (non-idea and programming related) work there would be no company either.
Coders tend to underestimate the importance of the supporting organization and the networking involved in getting a product to the shelves, not to mention selling it once it's in the stores. It's true that a lot of barriers have fallen in this area over the last years, but the main part of the job is still to get the software ready for the market, and actually getting it TO the market. In other words you (OK, we) tend to overestimate the value of ideas.
In the area of ideas: You do NOT need a brilliant idea (although it won't hurt). You need a good idea and a good plan. Without a plan you'll get exactly nowhere. Have you thought about distribution? PR? User segments? Competition? You NEED to think about those things, in order to find a way to package your IP in a product that will actually stand a chance of making money.
The last major misconception is in the area of the nature of business deals. It seems that a lot of people are outraged that he got "screwed over". Well guess what: People do not do business in order to be nice to eachother! They are out there to make money, and if you do not make sure that your ass is covered, the easiest way to make money will be to "screw you over". That would be your fault for not getting a good lawyer to check out the contract before you signed it, and not their fault for being evil capitalists. If you don't want to deal with capitalists, don't invite them in. If you don't want to deal with them, and your product needs financing to take off, your plan wasn't good enough :) In that case, bite the bullit and cross your fingers, 'cause there's no way to make sure that they can't screw you over somehow.
Finally you absolutely have to quit your day job in order to give your own idea the 110% attention it needs in order to become a moneymaker. You can NOT expect to make a fortune in your spare time. Actually your prospective investors expect that you spend at least half a year working on your idea ON YOUR OWN DIME... If you don't, well then you haven't shown sufficient confidence in your own ideas, right? They supply the resources, but you have to make them bellieve in you somehow.
To sum it up: Don't bitch - learn about the facts of business before you try to play in the big (or middle) leagues. Unfortunately the only reliable way to learn about business it to try it, so expect to get burnt once or twice. But it's no big deal.... You'll learn, and eventually (hopefully) you'll bag the big one some day.
Just don't count on doing it through amazing code alone, or expect that the venture capitalists are in the fairy godmother business.
"Why certaintly sir. May I inquire as to why you are dissatisfied?"
"It Hz..."
We are doing this at the IT University of Copenhagen right now. Se my post further down the page for more information.
And yes, this is great technology, but with quite a few limitations, which aren't all obvious. First and foremost is the problem that eye movements aren't 100% conciously controlled. Your eyes allways jitter slightly, and you have a tendency to track events outside the sceen with your eyes. The canonic illustration we use in discussions is, that you certaintly don't want the program to print your text, just because a bird flying close by your windows startled you, and made you look.
Second is the whole problem of when you "click". Dwell-time is quite popular, but has the drawback of not making you feel in controll, and leaving you all too often without a "safe harbour" on the screen. Using a "long blink" for clicking is a better option, but leaves you with another problem - distinguishing a shadow falling on the camera from a closed eye. Thus we often fall back on using a secondary device for clicking and doubleclicking.
Last is the whole issue of precision. Eye tracking today is rather unprecise, even under optimal conditions and with expensive "best of breed" equipment. As a rule of thumb, you shouldn't expect to be able to activate a button smaller than one square inch with any kind of precision, especially using dwell time for clicking.
So there you have it. Eye tracking certaintly is a usefull tool, but - for now - is rather far from the ultimate goal of direct mind interface to the computer. Actually it's a problem that eye controll sounds so fantastic, as it jacks the level of expectation from the users far too high for the state of the art. Right now you need specialized programs, and a lot of design effort to make the experience a good one - even under optimal conditions.
Just my 2 cents.
Please please please answer - the curiousity is KILLING me!
Now back in the old days of '91 when I took the course, we actually implemented a whole kernel in 68000 assembler on old eurocard-based Motorola machines named after dead greek philosophers... but those machines have by now sadly passed away. One was auctioned off as parts at a party, one went to the internal museum of ancient computer parts and one was used as the Danish analog to a piñata at our local analog to Halloween
At this page you can read all about the failed attempt that Alejandro Jodorowsky, Gieger and Moebius made way back when. Oh well... Since it never actually happened, it will always be perfect in our imagination I guess
Sure, if you could get latency for free. Only you can't. We are beyond the point where anything but perhaps general improvement in gate switching is an unballanced good. This is the same thing as trying to decide the optimum cache-line length. This is a function of many variables, and can't be decided in an isolated fashion.
Actually what I was saying implicitly in the original post was that the latency gap between CPU and memory is growing, so you'll have to optimize for either lower latency gap (= better caching, slower clock, smaller latency-gap) or higher clock (=simpler caching, higher IPC in core, larger latency-gap, longer cache-lines). If you go for higher clock, you want to optimize for bandwith, as this is more or less the only option.
RAMBUS is generally higher bandwith/higher latency than normal DRAM. There really isn't much we can do about the latency-gap, except perhaps going for avanced RAM architectures w. more intelligence in rows, or even individual cells, which costs transistors, which reduces storage capacity etc. etc.
That, or a whole new way of fabbing chips and/or memory. There a quite a few promising alternatives out there, memory-wise, but they are all experimental, so don't wait up
A lot of people here seem quite confused about why Intel has designed the P4 the way they did. I'll tell you why:
It's *all* about the memory bandwith
The gap in MHz between CPU and memory is growing, and has been growing for quite some time. Remember when you could still get 0-wait-state computers? That's a looong time ago now. Currently it's the memory subsystem (including caches) that is throtteling chip performance
Now: When you ramp up chip speed, you usually have to compromise on both cache size, and cache complexity. This is why a lot of chips (say the Alpha design) has direct-mapped level 1 cache, instead of n-way associative. Note that the P4 has smaller L1 cache than the P3.
So what can you do? If you want to design an architecture that will last for years, and possibly ramp to approximately 10GHz, you focus on getting the memory subsystem right first. You might even sacrifice performance pr. clock at "low" clocspeeds (by todays standards, that is), in order to insure that the basic design will last you a nice, long product cycle.
Thus the P4: Great memory bandwith, but less impressive performance pr. clock. Supporting evidence: Note that all large minis and supercomputers have really really REALLY exotic memory busses, focused on extreme throughput. We'll see more of this. Trust me!