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User: Catalina588

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Comments · 45

  1. Verizon? on What To Expect From Apple's Rumored MacPad · · Score: 1

    Apple would not easily abandon tens of millions of AT&T subscribers who own iPhones by forcing them to spend another $100 a month with a new carrier. Would they?

  2. Let's ask the customers... on Mass Speculation Suggests Oracle May Kill OpenSolaris · · Score: 4, Interesting
    About five years ago, Sun seriously considered killing Solaris on X86. What Sun customers said was "Do that and your SunFire servers will be out on the street as quickly as we can get them unplugged". These customers included the major NY city investment and merchant banks, and Sun was in no position to destroy relationships with key customers. Fast forward. Those same large financial institutions are still running Solaris, including Solaris on Sun-supplied X86. But the reason this rumor makes no sense is that Sun and Oracle grew on Wall Street together as less expensive alternatives to Big Iron IBM mainframes.

    Kill Sun Solaris and Oracle commits suicide. Makes no sense at all. Won't happen.

  3. Play or Pay on US House Democrats Unveil a Health Care Plan · · Score: 1

    If you do not enroll in a "qualified" health plan (and do not assume that your current health plan will qualify) and submit proof of enrollment to the federal government (i.e., IRS), then you'll be tracked down and fined (sections 3101, 6055). The fine will be enough "to accomplish the goal of enhancing participation in qualifying coverage" (section 161). Oh, and if you think the pain will be shared equally with the ruling political class, think again. Congress and federal employees are exempt from the tight, HMO-style controls in this bill (section 3116). Any American citizen who supports this bill as health care progress has to be either suicidal or filthy rich.

  4. This is not going to work cleanly at all on EU Wants Multiple Browser Bundling On New PCs · · Score: 1

    January 2010. OK, so I take my new Windows 7 laptop back to my Paris hotel. Too bad I accidently dropped the old one in the Seine. I start it up and select a browser to download. Oops, hard stop. The hotel, like many, requires a web browser present in order to authenticate and establish an Internet connection. No web browser, no connection, no browser download. Thanks, EU competition bureaucracy, for making it impossible to fulfill the EU-mandated requirements. (Unless the EU is going to put always-on Internet access ports in all public places. Not.)

  5. The real cost isn't developing Java, it's runtime on SpringSource Acquires Hyperic, Possibly Set to Target Microsoft and IBM · · Score: 1
    The really significant costs to enterprises, who do half their development in Java (source: Aberdeen Group market research), is not in Java development. There are plenty of developers. No, the costs are in Java execution. Java's garbage collection hiccups, for example, make it difficult to meet response time SLA's as volumes scale.

    Azul Systems is a company that specializes in accelerating Java workloads on Sun, IBM, and X86 machines. I see Azul as being at least as important to a "complete" Java solution as SpringSource and Hypernic..

  6. The solution is net neutrality on Think-Tank Warns of Internet "Brownouts" Starting Next Year · · Score: 1

    Our politicians believe the way to avoid brownouts is to require all traffic to fight for bandwidth at the same time. No protocol or user can be inhibited in their God-given right to use the Internet with as much bandwidth as they want, when they want. This is called net neutrality. I predict growth in private networks like Akamai as public nets are inundated. Then again, the next dip in the recession may knock a few tens of millions of the 'Net, avoiding the brownouts for a while longer.

  7. Re:Oracle as backoffice coupled to OS/X front offi on Oracle Buys Sun · · Score: 1

    In brief, Oracle will have the hardware and software to BE the cloud. However, it's not clear to me that they WANT to be the cloud. But neither Apple nor Oracle -- or together -- is likely to make a huge (> 10%) dent in Microsoft's Office monopoly anytime soon. Open Office has been out there for five years, and Apple is unwilling to invest to sell to the enterprise as it costs a lot more to make a sale than it does an iPod (as a percent of sales).

  8. Very Astute Move by Oracle on Oracle Buys Sun · · Score: 1
    My own market research shows enterprise developers doing roughly 40% in Java (the rest is .Net and legacy). Oracle has the entire OS-to-application stack. With Sun, they pick up Java and the Java Virtual Machine, Solaris (an enterprise hit) to offer along side Linux, and an ongoing home for Sun's large developer community. I see nothing but profits for Oracle from the software side of the Sun acquisition.

    But the hardware business becomes a boat anchor. Much of Oracle's expensive direct selling is done in joint bids with hardware vendors like IBM, HP, and Dell. Are HP sales reps going to call in Oracle if the Oracle-Sun hardware sales team becomes another dance card at the party? History says an emphatic "No". So don't be surprised if Oracle sells/spins off the hardware and hardware services business quickly.

  9. Answer: Kill Taxi Technology 1.0 on NYC Wants Ideas For "Taxi Technology 2.0" · · Score: 1
    Presuming that many readers have never driven in a NYC taxi before, picture a 10" LCD TV set with a vaudeville-voice happy-talk announcer blaring at you to "buckle up for safety" every 30 seconds. There is also weather forecast and Bloomberg financial news (it's New York) as well as other options.

    There is a GPS map option already and it's pretty accurate. But it sure doesn't tell you whether the cab driver is taking you by the most direct route or whether there are traffic jams ahead.

    Best idea is to kill the incessant "be safe and be happy-talk" voiceover.

  10. Re:Mod Parent Up on PG&E Makes Deal For Solar Power From Space · · Score: 1

    Thanks laing. You got my point exactly.

  11. What about the cost? on PG&E Makes Deal For Solar Power From Space · · Score: 1
    It costs $10,000 a pound to put an object into space. I sure am glad I am not a California rate-payer stuck with the requirement that 20% of electric power come from "alternative energy sources" by 2020.

    Does anybody want to take a SWAG at the cost per kilowatt hour of this "free energy"?

  12. Houghton-Mifflin Corp. circa 1972 on Worst Working Conditions You Had To Write Code In? · · Score: 1
    Mid-April. New order entry system turned on New Year's Day because that would be easier on Accounting. Orders are wrong. Physical inventory is a joke. Basic bookkeeping does not add up. SEC regulations require this NYSE company to report to stockholders within 30 days of quarter end. Nixon's wage and price controls are in effect, so you can go to jail for raising prices in a screwed up digital price list.

    The order-entry inventory control system is so screwed up that it was hard to tell where to start. With not enough rerun, compile and test time available, jobs were sent out to a local data center. That is, until the 17-year old driving the van flipped it on the interstate, dropping digital media all over the highway. Oh, and did I mention the bomb scares every other day?

  13. Re:I'm not seating it on Can SSDs Be Used For Software Development? · · Score: 1

    Ran two Intel X-25's for five months in RAID 0 under Vista Ultimate (32 bit) before they went down with symptoms of Windows Update installation taking longer than 24 hours to complete. Unable to recover or reinstall Windows on the RAID pair, so I yanked them. Too bad because the read performance is phenomenal.

  14. Intel-TSMC Deal is All About Customization on Intel Recruits TSMC To Produce Atom CPUs · · Score: 1
    These threads are wandering all over the place and getting away from the obvious: Intel's Atom will be a widely used processor for the next decade and beyond, so Intel needs to make Atom available in ways that Intel itself would not want to manufacture.

    Atom first appeared in consumer devices such as Netbooks. Millions of chips ... but not the billions of chips in the addressable market.

    As Atom is designed into embeddable products which require special characteristics such as automobiles (e.g., embeddable, low voltage, extreme temperatures), customers will want to save money by adding application-specific "logic blocks" to the silicon, creating a single "system on a chip".

    Intel's fabs are not well suited for economic production of small, custom chip runs to make these custom chips. TSMC is in the business of making such chips as the go-to fabricator for the world's soft fabs. So, Intel is handing off custom fab business it does not want to TSMC, while at the same time expanding the Atom market and nailing down a world-class "second source".

  15. Re:What environmental cost to build a new car? on Feds To Offer Cash For Your Clunker · · Score: 1
    Hey, you're replying to a former BMW Car Club of America officer. Yes, ten year old German cars are typically OK (excepting Trabants, of course). But that's the German law.

    Keeps the car workers busy too.

  16. Re:What environmental cost to build a new car? on Feds To Offer Cash For Your Clunker · · Score: 1
    Germany takes your car off the road after 10 years. Period. They also have a tough emissions and safety check. There are no junkers (pun intended) and fewer car wrecks caused by equipment failure.

    The proposed program pays a lot of money to get wrecks off our highways. I like the idea.

  17. Well the router OS is already available on Google Router Rumors · · Score: 1
    Huawei Technologies of China found it could easily clone Cisco hardware and, ummm, borrow Cisco's router OS.

    http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=56939

  18. Re:Next week article. on All of Vietnam's Government Computers To Use Linux, By Fiat · · Score: 1

    Guess this announcements means the Vietnamese version of Windows is put on hold. And what Linux distro are they using to get Vietnamese on Linux?

  19. Re:Too late on Is the Yellowstone Supervolcano About To Blow? · · Score: 1

    I saw a TV show on this subject in 2007. It's old news. But Yellowstone will indeedblow the plug off the caldera one of these days and pretty much wipe out human civilization as we know it. Happy New Year.

  20. Stealing copper is an economic crime, and the FBI on Copper Thieves Jeopardize US Infrastructure · · Score: 1
    Copper theft was a widely reported problem earlier in the year. But the price of copper is half what it was 50 days ago. Thieves have already moved on since it now takes twice as many pounds of copper to make the same money as on September 20th.

    As is common, the government (i.e., FBI) is behind the curve.

    Copper price chart at http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=%24copper

  21. Geoengineering is coming to the masses on Geoengineering To Cool the Earth Becoming Thinkable · · Score: 1

    The Discovery channel will broadcast an entire series in 2009 on geoengineering concepts and tests in the wild to see if they work. As in microparticles spread on glaciers. This tells me money-making TV tycoons see profits in global warming education.

  22. Small schools spend $25,000 for this? on Cray's CX1 Desktop Supercomputer, Now For Sale · · Score: 1
    The Intel Skulltrail is the small supercomputer price-performer right now. A Skulltrail is currently #3 in RAC at Rosetta@Home while simultaneously running GPGPU-based Folding@Home. All for less than $7,000.

    And you can play Crysis on it too.

    No, it's not Top 500-class HPC, but Skulltrail (or a roomful of Skulltrails) seems a better use of teaching dollars than a Cray.

  23. Sorry, you took the wrong path to a tax deduction. on Tax Write-Offs For Free (As In Speech) Work? · · Score: 2, Informative
    No, you cannot donate your time, as many posts above correctly state. Next time you create some serious intellectual property you intend to give away, I seriously recommend you engage a tax lawyer to help you set up the "gift" of the property to a charity with a 501.c (3) exemption. The intent is to value your "gift" at the fair market value for tax deduction purposes. I would think the copyright on a book used by thousands of pre-med students would be worth thousands with the right appraiser. (I hear real estate appraisers are looking for work these days).

    Good luck.

  24. Patently Unconstitutional on its Face! on US House Limits Constituent Emails · · Score: 5, Insightful
    What part of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does Congress not understand? The current situation is a "redress of grievances" to the average citizen.

    "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

  25. There goes the nVidia motherboard business on Intel X58 To Be First Non-NVIDIA Chipset To Get SLI · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I have a Foxconn-built 590i nVidia reference board that supports SLI and has a raft of other features like smart Ethernet, RAID, yada yada, yada. I also use a Skulltrail with SLI chips in it.

    The reason most gamers buy nVidia reference boards is to get SLI. With nVidia now certifying other vendors, starting with Intel's X58, the nVidia reference SLI motherboard market is RIP 2008.