I seem to remember reading that going from CPU1->CPU0->RAM was still faster (at least in many cases) that CPU->NB->RAM.
But the major reason to do it (at least in the server space) is because it's not shared. So if you have a 4 processor Intel server (which has a shared memory bus through the northbridge), and you have 1 GB/s of memory bandwidth (way to low, just an example), then if all processors are accessing memory they each get about 250 MB/s of data. If you go up to 8 processors the total memory bandwidth is the same, so now each processor would only get 125 MB/s (if they were all asking of memory at once). As you add processors, that situation becomes more and more common, meaning that your chips spend more and more time waiting on memory. So while adding a second CPU may boost performance 90%, the 8th may only boost it 10% or less (depends on the work your doing, etc.).
Now the Opteron each has it's own memory bus. That means that when you have 4 CPUs each with 1 GB/s of memory bandwidth (fictional number, again) there is a total of 4 GB/s of bandwidth. Each chip can work in it's own memory at 1 GB/s. When you go up to 8, or 16, or 32, or whatever it still works. So with a 8 processor server, each CPU still gets 1 GB/s. So when you add a second CPU to an Opteron system, it might boost performance 90% (again). But when you add the 8th, it will scale much better, so you might get an 80 or 85% boost.
So while putting 32 Intel chips on one motherboard would be basically pointless in many situations (because they processors would be stuck wating on memory), with an Opteron it would work pretty well.
And even if you only have 2 gigs of RAM, all that extra address space can really make things easier on the OS.
Yep. So they could solve it the same way AMD could. But that would still require a major technology change to use BTX with an on-die memory controller. You'd have to have the new chip, a new motherboard for it, and by the way you have to throw out that 4 gigs of ram from your last machine you were going to add on to and buy this new (read: expensive for now) memory. I think that's alot for Intel to ask. And that doens't even mention that do that they would still have to put the on-die controller... on-die, and make it work with FB-DIMMS (as opposed to DDR/DDR2/RDRAM).
Intel's current chipset for the Noncona (Tumwater?) has an error in it. Certain PCIe cards cause the error (I don't know if it's hangs or no-boots or what). So untill new chips are made and distributed near the end of this year, boards with the Intel chipset can't run various PCIe cards. PCI and PCI-X work, as do some validated PCIe cards, but that's a major hang-up.
I'll take a chipset that work (never had a problem with my NForce2) over one that doesn't work with a major new technology (PCIe) any day.
Yes, they are capable. And yes, it was a design choice not to put it on-die for the P4. But the Opteron came around and does fantastic in many areas, and that on-die controller helps a load for a relativly few transistors. But my point was that now because Intel want's everyone to go to BTX, if they decided to go on-die now, they are going to have a big problem because of trace length. That is why no one (to my knowledge) makes (or has announced) a BTX board for the Opteron. Intel can't make the memory controller on-die because of that reason (BTX), not because of lack of ability.
I mean, if they can design a chip as complex as the P4, surely they can design an on-die memory controller. Especially since they could probably lift more than half of it off a northbridge chip.
While the 64-bit part may not seem to make that much of a difference, the other parts of the architecutre (like the 20+ extra general purpose registers) can make a large difference in some programs. As compilers get better, so will the performance of 64-bit code.
There are also the "intangibles". For example right now software can only use about 3 gigs of memory without hacks (PAE and such). This is because there is only 4 gigs of address space and the OS and libraries must be in there somewhere, so most OSes give the OS 1 or 2 gigs of that address space. And you must map a library into each program's view of the address space, possibly into different areas. With a 64-bit address space, you could give a full 4 gigs to tons of programs, all while having lots of libraries loaded and have a simple linear addressing space for everyone. This simplifies things quite a bit. And when you need to use more than 4 gigs of data, you'll be able to without any performance hit.
The biggest difference you'll see are the registers. While it won't help you type faster into a word processor, it could very well help a game out.
It's entirely possible that things have changed since the version that had it disabled. While your 486 analagy makes sense (and they probably will do that with some chips that fail the 64 bit tests), it's possible there have been other changes. Inten could have added instructions since the eariler chips that had it disabled, or bugs could have been found that mean the chip wouldn't run correctly if the extra circuits were enabled.
My guess is that it would work, but they've been fine-tuning it the whole time and so if you could enable an old one, a new chip (pre-enabled) would be faster than an old one, as they were using the extra time MS gave them (intentionally or not) to make things better.
There are other differences that could account for it. For example I've heard that Intel "tacked on" the 64-bit part to the chip, while the Opteron was designed with the 64-bit stuff from the ground up. That could account for the difference (if true). Also remember that the Intel has a longer pipeline (misperdicted branches and such hurt more), and that the Opteron has it's on-die memory controller (drastically reduces latency to RAM). There are other options. Code out there today is most likely optomized for the Opteron.
I wasn't into computers when the switch from 286 to 386 happened (I was 2 when it was released in '85). But I can imagine all sorts of situations where a normal person would bump up against numbers bigger than 64k. If you want to keep track of finances and you do it with integers (better than floating point for money), then you max out at ~65000 pennies. That $650. It's not that hard to wrap around a 16bit number in real life.
32 bit numbers work much better. The main reason to upgrade is not because people are using so many 64 bit numbers, but because memory space is becomming a problem and the added memory (or even just extra address space) can make a big difference. This isn't the revolutionary leap that the 386 was. I doubt we'll see such a big difference again.
Even if the two chips performed identically in how fast they executed instructions, ran the same clockspeed, etc... AMD still has the edge.
Because the Opteron has an on-die memory controller. That can boost things up to 20% in some cases. It also makes designing motherboards easier because you don't need both a north and southbridge. It makes it harder to upgrade to a new memory technology, but it can be disabled allowing you to do that (I think). If they switched to that buffered "FB-RAM" or whatever (there was an article on the idea a while back on a big hardware site) that would fix that.
But anyway, Intel is stuck in a hard place. Because of the memory controller, their chips perform slower because of the extra latency, so they must ratchet up clockspeeds. The solution? An on-die memory controller. So why don't they do it? They CAN'T.
Intel has been pushing BTX for a variety of reasons (although most people blame Prescott's heat for it). But the way BTX is designed Opteron boards can't be made into a BTX form-factor because the memory is too far away from the CPU (there is too much electrical noise, IIRC). This means that Intel can't switch to an on-die controller without either changing BTX (what I think will happen because of AMD), or finding a way around the noise problem (little faraday cages?).
If you add in things like that the Intel chip only supports 36-bit address (I believe) while the Opteron handles 64-bit addresses (the actual bus is smaller right now, but that could easily be changed) and other performance factors (the top P4EE is outperformed in Doom 3 by a chip that costs more than $800 less, see the Inquirer) and Intel is in hot water.
All of this should be interesting to see what happens. Intel seems to be in trouble (performance wise, at least in the short term).
I understand your complaint about carying around extra batteries, but many laptops let you put an extra battery in a bay where a floppy/CD drive goes. Mine does. I use that to double my battery life. It does make the laptop heavier, and it's not an option on small notebooks, but many larger ones allow you do this. On top of that, my laptop is "3 spindle" which means I have room for two batteries while still having the integrated optical drive in my laptop. I don't lose my CD/DVD drive. The only time I every take a battery out of my laptop is the rare occation I need to use a floppy disk.
Other than that things like forcing the laptop to stay in ultra-conservative power miser mode, or getting a laptop based on a low power processor (Pentium M, Transmeta Crusoe, etc) can help. Also, if you are willing to pay for it, see if there is an extra battery for the laptop you are buying that has a higher capacity than the one that ships standard. Replace the stock with the high capacity, and you've got more battery life.
But there are two problems with that method. The first is that if MS gets used to this and starts calling people's bluffs, then one of two things will happen. They'll buy MS at MS prices, or they'll go Linux at the cheap price. I wonder which. That would be a blow for MS.
The second problem is even if MS doesn't call bluffs (and not all will be bluffs, of course) this will hurt MS's proffit margins. Without those amazing Windows and Office margins, they have less for everything else. That means either making Windows and Office and such better so they are worth that high price (great for consumers), or they have to stop branching out into everything and only do things they proffit at (not neccessarily bad for others).
So no matter what happens, MS could be facing some problems. The fact is MS isn't a total monopoly (like AT&T was, or the post office is for mail), they do have competition. And when you're not a total monopoly, you can lose that position. MS's reserves and such can only let them play bully so long before they start having to really compete on prices, features, and such. It may take years and years, but this is a crack in the damn of the monopoly. Eventually, MS will lose that position and be another business in free-market competition.
Also, "... be attracted to buying MS products because they THOUGHT they're getting a discount now." Huh? Why would anyone look at MS's software because they might get a discount? I would bet in at least 99% of the cases, they would have been looking at MS anyway. I don't think this really changes things for companies seeking MS, if anything they'll seek Linux.
And this is NOT good PR for MS. This is "they almost lost and had to dive to save face and get the account" publicity. That's not what you want. You want "they came in and even though they were more expensive, they blew away the competition" PR. These kind of reports (that MS dropped prices because of the threat of Linux/MacOS/anything) are BAD for MS any way you look at it.
It's not that the market is being eaten up, so much as the bar is being raised. iPods aren't going to have any trouble staying profitable. They hold tons of songs and have a great UI. The only MP3 players that should be worried are the small flash based ones. They are the ones that can be easily replaced with a cell phone. Same thing with cameras. You may see those $50 or $100 digital cameras in stores that people might buy for snapshots. Those things are going to disappear as cameraphones become more common. That said, cameraphones won't be replacing the 3+ megapixel cameras any time soon. True point and shoot cameras still have a market. If all you need is to store a few phone numbers and maybe a few addresses, then there is no problem with a cell-phone. But those people who use their PDAs for phone numbers, addresses, appointments, note taking, etc. will keep their PDAs.
It's not that the market is "shrinking", it's that the low end devices that aren't very good and only sold because of their price can be easily replaced. It will be at least a few years before people's cellphones replace their digital cameras on vacations or give up their iPod minis.
And note that no one is claiming that the GBA is going to die because of cell phones. They may have games and such, but the GBA is a whole other calibar. Well made devices have nothing to fear. The portable games that are going to suffer are the little Tiger handhelds and such.
Consumers, by and large, only stand to gain from this. Survival of the fittest garuntees that most of these devices will be around for a while, and the substandard stuff will fall off the market. Which consumers lose?
And to those of you that say "I just want a phone that's a phone, dang it", we're in the gadget phase right now. It's all new. Wow, I can get a cell phone that can do THAT? As novelty wares off and people see that the extra features aren't that great by and large, you'll start to see simpler phones. Just because I might be able to get phone/camera/MP3 player/PDA/etc for free with my contract doesn't mean I want the thing around. Bulk and interface often suffer. The "cell-phone-only" will come.
The battery companies do the same things. They manufacture batteries for 3rd parties. When you Wal-Mart or Safeway batteries, there is a good chance you are actually buying an Energizer or Duracel. The companies admit that they do this, but the last time I saw a report on it they wouldn't admit who they manufactured batteries for, and gave some doubletalk about how their batteries were better quality for some reason (higher testing, higher standards, whatever).
I suspect that this is common in all industries. There is a decent chance that there is a reason you can't tell the difference between the namebrand and the knockoff sometimes.
By and large I agree with you. I especially hate the laws that legislate what you think. By that I mean "hate crimes". I'm white. Let's say I killed a black person. Why is it a worse crime if I kill him because he's black (hate crime) than if I kill him because he bumped into me (some pointless reason, this is normal murder). That kind of thing is a dangerous line to start crossing.
The one thing I would like to point out in your post is the "killing a pregnant person" law (ignoring the fact that the politically correct "person" in that statement is pointless as with the exception of Governer Arnold, there are few pregnant men). That law (I assume you refer to the so called "Lacy Peterson" law) serves a specific purpose. If a pregnant women is killed who was going to have her baby (not abort it) then two people die. The problem is that current law doesn't recognise that. The point of the law is to make killing a pregnant women two counts of murder, instead of one. I think that's a great idea.
But as to the other "special" laws for "special" cases, I agree. And the worst part is that things are only going to get stranger. As you start "protecting" more and more special classes, we're going to start seeing stranger laws ("It's illegal to punch people in the stomach on a tuesday unless they just ate a single hamburger with pickles, in which case it's legal; unless the month is November or the victim has green tattoo on her left side".) Now thing obviously won't get THAT bad, but things are going to get worse and more complicated untill people wise up.
And it's not like most of these things (driving while watching a DVD) aren't covered by current law (not paying attention while driving).
I can understand the appeal of holding a few MP3s on your cellphone (to a degree), but only 12 songs? Now Apple considders a song to be a 128 kbps AAC file 4 minutes long (off the bottom of the iPod tech spec page). So that means that this thing must hold 48 minutes of audio, 48mb of storage (since 128 kbps is about a meg a minute).
First of all, the 48mb seems a little odd to me. I guess it's a 64mb device, with 16 used for the phone's OS/address book/ringtones/etc. But more importantly, why not make it hold 74 minutes of music. One full CD. I think that would be ideal for tiny storage. That would be 74mb, and if you include the 16 for the phone's other requirements you get 90 megs. That means that using 96 mb of memory on the phone, you could hold the OS and such, and 80 minutes of audio. Seems fantastic to me.
That said, I have three other comments. First, how 'bout bluetooth so you can use your Bluetooth headset to listen to music? Second, will the memory be expandable? That would be great. Third, can you use your files (MP3, AAC, etc) as ringtones? Those would be three nice things.
It will be interesting to see how all this pans out.
The record companies out to be PAYING THE DENTISTS. Let's face it, how many other places are there where you get a captive audience who can't get away? At a car dealer or something I can walk out the door. But when you're stuck in the dentist's chair with a pair of hands in your mouth, you can't avoid the music too easily.
You go to bookstores and they have CDs up front of the music they are playing in the store, why aren't record companies doing the same thing at dentist's offices?
I don't care. If this shuts up those idiots who make a 3 city block radius around their car shake because that trash they listen to (hereafter known as "music" for lack of a better term) has to be loud to be "good" (because if you can hear any of the sounds clearly, you can tell how terrible it is).
Arrest 'em all, I won't care. I'll be glad. Ignore the dentists and such, go after the jerks that try to make everone deaf.
"We will also be attacking auto shops,
billing some breakfast nooks,
complaining about co-ops,
demanding at doctor's offices,
enjuncting eateries,
freaking out flyers,
grabbing from greenhouses,
holding up hotels,
infringing on rights at investment offices,
jostling Jeep dealers,
kneedling some knitting stores,
leavying against lawyers' offices,
meddling at muesems,
nosing around news stands,
offending offices,
prodding price-clubs,
questioning Quick Stops,
requesting of restrants,
shaking-down a few sugar shacks,
troubling travel agents,
unhinging uppolstry shop managers,
video-taping vacuum stores,
wringing out waterparks,
X-Raying Xerox service centers,
yelling at yogurt shops,
and zig zagging around zoos.
"
Good thing nothing like this ever happens in the US. *sigh*
Yeah, I was thinking IDE and a standard 33mhz 32bit PCI bus. Your right, SCSI goes up the 320 and the bus can handle it if you use PCI-X, PCI express, 66mhz PCI, 64bit PCI, etc. Nice catch.
SCSI will be replaced by SAS, or Serial Attached SCSI. That is basically a superset of Serial ATA (IIRC). All the benefits of going from ATA->Serial ATA apply to SCSI->SAS. The smaller cables, the longer lengths, the lower voltages, etc. SCSI has had command queueing and hot-plug for a while already though.
Everyone is going serial. USB, SAS, Serial ATA, etc. Time to invest in Kellogs.
My guess is a simple one. Who buys SCSI stuff? It's expensive so it's mostly businesses and others who need high reliability (which one of the major reasons SCSI is more expensive). Now while normal people can "afford" to lose 250, 300, or more GB of data, for a business that could be worth billions of dollars.
The solution to this reliability problem is the RAID. There are two RAID levels that are ideal (there are more, but this is a simple explanation). There is 1, which is just a mirror; and 5, which is striping with parity.
With RAID 1, if you have 500 GB of data, you would need 2 500 GB drives. You lose 50% of the capacity you buy. The other option is RAID 5, where you lose (1/number of disks). So you could store 500 GB of data on 6 100 GB disks. This way you've only lost 100 GB of storage to redundancy as opposed to 500 GB.
So when businesses want to store large ammounts of data, it's more economical to use many smaller drivers than to large drives. Even if you don't need the redundancy (for example the disk is just being used for temporary storage while working on large digital picture or video files) they it's still better to use many small disks. While using a 500 GB drive will only go so fast (lets just say 60 MB/s sustained), by using a RAID, you can mulitply that. So by using 5 100 GB drives, you might be able to sustain 300 MB/s (assuming the bus can keep up, etc). Even if you only scale at 50% (that would be 150 MB/s) that's still 2 to 3 times faster than a single drive. That performance can save you money.
So, if you can afford it you can get much better performance or economics from using multiple smaller drives from one large one.
That's my theory/understanding. Begin tearing it apart!
I conned my parrents into buying the JetDirect card (I was a minor living at home then). It's expensive, but it's quite nice. We didn't increase the RAM on the printer, it works just fine. It looks like the JetDirects cards run $350 (which was about what we paid).
A Linksys solution (the Etherfast 10/100 server, model PPSX1) is $98 bucks on CDW. A HP JetDirect card (model J3113A) is about $80 on eBay after a quick search. J3110A is my model according to the status page, but I can't find any.
I'd get the JetDirect card, but that's me. The Linksys will let you use ANY printer, so you can keep it if you later get a new printer. I'm not sure how different the performance of the two would be.
The HP cards are great, and for a business I can see how they can sell them, but for a home user like me who happens to have a "high end" printer, they are very expensive (3.5x as much as 3rd party solutions). Of course you could always dedicate some aincent PC as a print server by putting Linux on it. Even a 386 with a 10base-T card would work fine. That would be the geek solution;)
I agree. I own many Dells, and I'm typing on one now. I don't believe that opening it would void a warrantee, but even if it did Dell is quite nice.
Really I've never understood the anti-Dell bias. The worst incedent I know of was when a neighbor's laptop's power supply died and she couldn't charge her laptop and needed to write a term paper. They sent her a new one but it didn't arrive in time and didn't work. She wrote the paper on another computer and was fine, but mad a Dell. So they sent her another new one that worked, all of this was free (even with the overnight shipping which she didn't have the warrantee level to cover), AND they gave her a digital camera for her troubles.
I've been dealing with Dell for at least 7 years and they've always been great. I would be AMAMZED if they had a problem with someone putting a TV Tuner in their PC.
I had it for a while before we needed to be able to print even when my computer wasn't working. So we bought a JetDirect card for it (the price was a ripoff, but it's a great product, the wireless version is even more rediculous). Haven't had a problem with it. We've replaced the toner once or twice in the time we've owned it, but we've owned it for a VERY long time and use it heavily.
Later my brother got a Mac so we got a PostScript cartrdige (really a DIMM) for it, which made printing even better. I love the printer.
For color, we have an Epson that we use for photos and such, but otherwise we use the laser.
The coolest part of the JetDirect card besides that it runs LPR and such is all the statistics I can access about my printer through my web browser. Here are some examples:
Been up 119 days, 14:17:53 (this is only because of a brownout)
Slashdot Mirror
But the major reason to do it (at least in the server space) is because it's not shared. So if you have a 4 processor Intel server (which has a shared memory bus through the northbridge), and you have 1 GB/s of memory bandwidth (way to low, just an example), then if all processors are accessing memory they each get about 250 MB/s of data. If you go up to 8 processors the total memory bandwidth is the same, so now each processor would only get 125 MB/s (if they were all asking of memory at once). As you add processors, that situation becomes more and more common, meaning that your chips spend more and more time waiting on memory. So while adding a second CPU may boost performance 90%, the 8th may only boost it 10% or less (depends on the work your doing, etc.).
Now the Opteron each has it's own memory bus. That means that when you have 4 CPUs each with 1 GB/s of memory bandwidth (fictional number, again) there is a total of 4 GB/s of bandwidth. Each chip can work in it's own memory at 1 GB/s. When you go up to 8, or 16, or 32, or whatever it still works. So with a 8 processor server, each CPU still gets 1 GB/s. So when you add a second CPU to an Opteron system, it might boost performance 90% (again). But when you add the 8th, it will scale much better, so you might get an 80 or 85% boost.
So while putting 32 Intel chips on one motherboard would be basically pointless in many situations (because they processors would be stuck wating on memory), with an Opteron it would work pretty well.
And even if you only have 2 gigs of RAM, all that extra address space can really make things easier on the OS.
Yep. So they could solve it the same way AMD could. But that would still require a major technology change to use BTX with an on-die memory controller. You'd have to have the new chip, a new motherboard for it, and by the way you have to throw out that 4 gigs of ram from your last machine you were going to add on to and buy this new (read: expensive for now) memory. I think that's alot for Intel to ask. And that doens't even mention that do that they would still have to put the on-die controller... on-die, and make it work with FB-DIMMS (as opposed to DDR/DDR2/RDRAM).
I'll take a chipset that work (never had a problem with my NForce2) over one that doesn't work with a major new technology (PCIe) any day.
I mean, if they can design a chip as complex as the P4, surely they can design an on-die memory controller. Especially since they could probably lift more than half of it off a northbridge chip.
Sorry if you miss-understood my point.
There are also the "intangibles". For example right now software can only use about 3 gigs of memory without hacks (PAE and such). This is because there is only 4 gigs of address space and the OS and libraries must be in there somewhere, so most OSes give the OS 1 or 2 gigs of that address space. And you must map a library into each program's view of the address space, possibly into different areas. With a 64-bit address space, you could give a full 4 gigs to tons of programs, all while having lots of libraries loaded and have a simple linear addressing space for everyone. This simplifies things quite a bit. And when you need to use more than 4 gigs of data, you'll be able to without any performance hit.
The biggest difference you'll see are the registers. While it won't help you type faster into a word processor, it could very well help a game out.
My guess is that it would work, but they've been fine-tuning it the whole time and so if you could enable an old one, a new chip (pre-enabled) would be faster than an old one, as they were using the extra time MS gave them (intentionally or not) to make things better.
There are other differences that could account for it. For example I've heard that Intel "tacked on" the 64-bit part to the chip, while the Opteron was designed with the 64-bit stuff from the ground up. That could account for the difference (if true). Also remember that the Intel has a longer pipeline (misperdicted branches and such hurt more), and that the Opteron has it's on-die memory controller (drastically reduces latency to RAM). There are other options. Code out there today is most likely optomized for the Opteron.
32 bit numbers work much better. The main reason to upgrade is not because people are using so many 64 bit numbers, but because memory space is becomming a problem and the added memory (or even just extra address space) can make a big difference. This isn't the revolutionary leap that the 386 was. I doubt we'll see such a big difference again.
Because the Opteron has an on-die memory controller. That can boost things up to 20% in some cases. It also makes designing motherboards easier because you don't need both a north and southbridge. It makes it harder to upgrade to a new memory technology, but it can be disabled allowing you to do that (I think). If they switched to that buffered "FB-RAM" or whatever (there was an article on the idea a while back on a big hardware site) that would fix that.
But anyway, Intel is stuck in a hard place. Because of the memory controller, their chips perform slower because of the extra latency, so they must ratchet up clockspeeds. The solution? An on-die memory controller. So why don't they do it? They CAN'T.
Intel has been pushing BTX for a variety of reasons (although most people blame Prescott's heat for it). But the way BTX is designed Opteron boards can't be made into a BTX form-factor because the memory is too far away from the CPU (there is too much electrical noise, IIRC). This means that Intel can't switch to an on-die controller without either changing BTX (what I think will happen because of AMD), or finding a way around the noise problem (little faraday cages?).
If you add in things like that the Intel chip only supports 36-bit address (I believe) while the Opteron handles 64-bit addresses (the actual bus is smaller right now, but that could easily be changed) and other performance factors (the top P4EE is outperformed in Doom 3 by a chip that costs more than $800 less, see the Inquirer) and Intel is in hot water.
All of this should be interesting to see what happens. Intel seems to be in trouble (performance wise, at least in the short term).
Other than that things like forcing the laptop to stay in ultra-conservative power miser mode, or getting a laptop based on a low power processor (Pentium M, Transmeta Crusoe, etc) can help. Also, if you are willing to pay for it, see if there is an extra battery for the laptop you are buying that has a higher capacity than the one that ships standard. Replace the stock with the high capacity, and you've got more battery life.
I wonder if he has a little Apple shaped scar now?
The second problem is even if MS doesn't call bluffs (and not all will be bluffs, of course) this will hurt MS's proffit margins. Without those amazing Windows and Office margins, they have less for everything else. That means either making Windows and Office and such better so they are worth that high price (great for consumers), or they have to stop branching out into everything and only do things they proffit at (not neccessarily bad for others).
So no matter what happens, MS could be facing some problems. The fact is MS isn't a total monopoly (like AT&T was, or the post office is for mail), they do have competition. And when you're not a total monopoly, you can lose that position. MS's reserves and such can only let them play bully so long before they start having to really compete on prices, features, and such. It may take years and years, but this is a crack in the damn of the monopoly. Eventually, MS will lose that position and be another business in free-market competition.
Also, "... be attracted to buying MS products because they THOUGHT they're getting a discount now." Huh? Why would anyone look at MS's software because they might get a discount? I would bet in at least 99% of the cases, they would have been looking at MS anyway. I don't think this really changes things for companies seeking MS, if anything they'll seek Linux.
And this is NOT good PR for MS. This is "they almost lost and had to dive to save face and get the account" publicity. That's not what you want. You want "they came in and even though they were more expensive, they blew away the competition" PR. These kind of reports (that MS dropped prices because of the threat of Linux/MacOS/anything) are BAD for MS any way you look at it.
It's not that the market is "shrinking", it's that the low end devices that aren't very good and only sold because of their price can be easily replaced. It will be at least a few years before people's cellphones replace their digital cameras on vacations or give up their iPod minis.
And note that no one is claiming that the GBA is going to die because of cell phones. They may have games and such, but the GBA is a whole other calibar. Well made devices have nothing to fear. The portable games that are going to suffer are the little Tiger handhelds and such.
Consumers, by and large, only stand to gain from this. Survival of the fittest garuntees that most of these devices will be around for a while, and the substandard stuff will fall off the market. Which consumers lose?
And to those of you that say "I just want a phone that's a phone, dang it", we're in the gadget phase right now. It's all new. Wow, I can get a cell phone that can do THAT? As novelty wares off and people see that the extra features aren't that great by and large, you'll start to see simpler phones. Just because I might be able to get phone/camera/MP3 player/PDA/etc for free with my contract doesn't mean I want the thing around. Bulk and interface often suffer. The "cell-phone-only" will come.
I suspect that this is common in all industries. There is a decent chance that there is a reason you can't tell the difference between the namebrand and the knockoff sometimes.
The one thing I would like to point out in your post is the "killing a pregnant person" law (ignoring the fact that the politically correct "person" in that statement is pointless as with the exception of Governer Arnold, there are few pregnant men). That law (I assume you refer to the so called "Lacy Peterson" law) serves a specific purpose. If a pregnant women is killed who was going to have her baby (not abort it) then two people die. The problem is that current law doesn't recognise that. The point of the law is to make killing a pregnant women two counts of murder, instead of one. I think that's a great idea.
But as to the other "special" laws for "special" cases, I agree. And the worst part is that things are only going to get stranger. As you start "protecting" more and more special classes, we're going to start seeing stranger laws ("It's illegal to punch people in the stomach on a tuesday unless they just ate a single hamburger with pickles, in which case it's legal; unless the month is November or the victim has green tattoo on her left side".) Now thing obviously won't get THAT bad, but things are going to get worse and more complicated untill people wise up.
And it's not like most of these things (driving while watching a DVD) aren't covered by current law (not paying attention while driving).
First of all, the 48mb seems a little odd to me. I guess it's a 64mb device, with 16 used for the phone's OS/address book/ringtones/etc. But more importantly, why not make it hold 74 minutes of music. One full CD. I think that would be ideal for tiny storage. That would be 74mb, and if you include the 16 for the phone's other requirements you get 90 megs. That means that using 96 mb of memory on the phone, you could hold the OS and such, and 80 minutes of audio. Seems fantastic to me.
That said, I have three other comments. First, how 'bout bluetooth so you can use your Bluetooth headset to listen to music? Second, will the memory be expandable? That would be great. Third, can you use your files (MP3, AAC, etc) as ringtones? Those would be three nice things.
It will be interesting to see how all this pans out.
You go to bookstores and they have CDs up front of the music they are playing in the store, why aren't record companies doing the same thing at dentist's offices?
Arrest 'em all, I won't care. I'll be glad. Ignore the dentists and such, go after the jerks that try to make everone deaf.
"We will also be attacking auto shops,
billing some breakfast nooks,
complaining about co-ops,
demanding at doctor's offices,
enjuncting eateries,
freaking out flyers,
grabbing from greenhouses,
holding up hotels,
infringing on rights at investment offices,
jostling Jeep dealers,
kneedling some knitting stores,
leavying against lawyers' offices,
meddling at muesems,
nosing around news stands,
offending offices,
prodding price-clubs,
questioning Quick Stops,
requesting of restrants,
shaking-down a few sugar shacks,
troubling travel agents,
unhinging uppolstry shop managers,
video-taping vacuum stores,
wringing out waterparks,
X-Raying Xerox service centers,
yelling at yogurt shops,
and zig zagging around zoos. "
Good thing nothing like this ever happens in the US. *sigh*
Yeah, I was thinking IDE and a standard 33mhz 32bit PCI bus. Your right, SCSI goes up the 320 and the bus can handle it if you use PCI-X, PCI express, 66mhz PCI, 64bit PCI, etc. Nice catch.
Everyone is going serial. USB, SAS, Serial ATA, etc. Time to invest in Kellogs.
Oops, wrong "cerial".
(sorry for the pun, couldn't help it).
The solution to this reliability problem is the RAID. There are two RAID levels that are ideal (there are more, but this is a simple explanation). There is 1, which is just a mirror; and 5, which is striping with parity.
With RAID 1, if you have 500 GB of data, you would need 2 500 GB drives. You lose 50% of the capacity you buy. The other option is RAID 5, where you lose (1/number of disks). So you could store 500 GB of data on 6 100 GB disks. This way you've only lost 100 GB of storage to redundancy as opposed to 500 GB.
So when businesses want to store large ammounts of data, it's more economical to use many smaller drivers than to large drives. Even if you don't need the redundancy (for example the disk is just being used for temporary storage while working on large digital picture or video files) they it's still better to use many small disks. While using a 500 GB drive will only go so fast (lets just say 60 MB/s sustained), by using a RAID, you can mulitply that. So by using 5 100 GB drives, you might be able to sustain 300 MB/s (assuming the bus can keep up, etc). Even if you only scale at 50% (that would be 150 MB/s) that's still 2 to 3 times faster than a single drive. That performance can save you money.
So, if you can afford it you can get much better performance or economics from using multiple smaller drives from one large one.
That's my theory/understanding. Begin tearing it apart!
A Linksys solution (the Etherfast 10/100 server, model PPSX1) is $98 bucks on CDW. A HP JetDirect card (model J3113A) is about $80 on eBay after a quick search. J3110A is my model according to the status page, but I can't find any.
I'd get the JetDirect card, but that's me. The Linksys will let you use ANY printer, so you can keep it if you later get a new printer. I'm not sure how different the performance of the two would be.
The HP cards are great, and for a business I can see how they can sell them, but for a home user like me who happens to have a "high end" printer, they are very expensive (3.5x as much as 3rd party solutions). Of course you could always dedicate some aincent PC as a print server by putting Linux on it. Even a 386 with a 10base-T card would work fine. That would be the geek solution ;)
Really I've never understood the anti-Dell bias. The worst incedent I know of was when a neighbor's laptop's power supply died and she couldn't charge her laptop and needed to write a term paper. They sent her a new one but it didn't arrive in time and didn't work. She wrote the paper on another computer and was fine, but mad a Dell. So they sent her another new one that worked, all of this was free (even with the overnight shipping which she didn't have the warrantee level to cover), AND they gave her a digital camera for her troubles.
I've been dealing with Dell for at least 7 years and they've always been great. I would be AMAMZED if they had a problem with someone putting a TV Tuner in their PC.
Later my brother got a Mac so we got a PostScript cartrdige (really a DIMM) for it, which made printing even better. I love the printer.
For color, we have an Epson that we use for photos and such, but otherwise we use the laser.
The coolest part of the JetDirect card besides that it runs LPR and such is all the statistics I can access about my printer through my web browser. Here are some examples:
I just wish the interface wasn't in Java.