Well, I can sort of see why the law doesn't want to let you go jurisdiction shopping. If US law says any copy legally made under foreign law is equal to one made under US law then you can pick any one of 165+ copyright laws (Berne convention, more if any country) that is most favorable to you. Like in this case, I'm sure what they're worried about is that you can make an online shop and say the manufacture and sale happens outside the US, it is only delivered to the US which circumvents any local law.
AMD is not by any stretch of the imagination doing fine. Last year after Q3 they had an operating income (note: not total income) of 297 million. This year they have a 634 million operating loss.
I realized that under GAAP rules their one-time payoff to GlobalFoundries earlier this year was counted as "Operating Cost, Other" and that was 703 million so their daily operations are not that screwed. But now in the last quarter they had a real operating loss, even AMDs "Adjusted EBITDA" was negative. Guess it's too long between I read financial reports.
Or even the same audience at different times. I've played Angry Birds a lot on the road - it's rather hard to bring a full console/PC to play on the bus. It doesn't mean I want to play it at home where I got a full gaming rig. My willingness to pay is also very different, on my phone I just want "pass the time" games and there's plenty $1 offerings that do that, while at home I'm spending my leisure time and I want high quality entertainment. I'm not looking to just pass the time until it's time to go back to work again.
The company (not necessarily AMD) may be doing fine but the uppity-ups found that they could be more profitable eliminating X jobs
AMD is not by any stretch of the imagination doing fine. Last year after Q3 they had an operating income (note: not total income) of 297 million. This year they have a 634 million operating loss. That's a lot for a company with 4612 million in assets. What's worse is where they're going
a) Revenue is down - they sell less b) Gross margin is down - they make less per sale c) R&D is down - a little but they're behind already d) Accounts receivable is down - orders are down e) Inventory is piling up - can it be sold?
That's my economist's hat. My strategist's hat is telling me that where AMD has done best lately with APUs is going to be dead center in the upcoming war with Chipzilla on one side and ARM selling billions of smart phones and tablets on the other side. Both sides will be pouring money into R&D. Both sides will cut margins to win the market. If I was AMD I'd feel about as comfortable as Poland stuck between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Sovet Union in the late 30s.
The tech nerd in me really wants AMD to bounce back and fight it off, but I'm having big difficulty finding the right shade of rosy colored glasses to make it possible. I just hope AMD the CPU company doesn't drag AMD the GPU company down with them, because their graphics cards are still pretty competitive to nVidia.
Well it's a 84" TV, the only 1920x1080 resolution TV I know of with equal or greater size is Sharp's 90" LCD which also has a $10k price tag. In that sense $17k is not bad for 6 less inches and 4 times the pixels. For monitors Intel has predicted 4K monitors for 2013, they've upgraded Ivy Bridge with 4K support and video acceleration (over two cables) and Haswell will support 4K over one cable. I bet they're not doing this without good hints from Apple, who probably won't let their MBPs have better resolution than their iMac/Mac Pros for long. Applications and photos will benefit, 4K video is a bit off but JVC has a $5000 3840x2160p camcorder today - if they can get it down a few thousand into the "prosumer" market suddenly 4K can seem useful even if Hollywood is busy planning new DRM for their UHD discs.
Does the definition of 20/20 vision really mix imperial and metric units?
No, the definition is a visual acuity of one arc minute (1/60th of a degree). When you figure out how much that is at 20 feet you can use any unit you want.
1. It is not the ideal angle, it's the worst seat in the cinema that can call itself "THX recommended" - very big difference. What most people would call an ideal seat in the middle of the cinema is well in to the 40s with the closest seat - which most people find too close - over 50 degrees. Then again that is also because those seats are so far down so you have vertical issues looking at the screen, but no doubt there's a thing as too close. 2. Here's a quote: "Dr. Colenbrander also emphasizes that, contrary to popular belief, 20/20 is not actually normal or average, let alone perfect, acuity. Snellen, he says, established it is a reference standard. Normal acuity in healthy adults is one or two lines better. Average acuity in a population sample does not drop to the 20/20 level until age 60 or 70. This explains the existence of the two lines smaller than 20/20: 20/15 and 20/10."
Both taken together there's a pretty good case for 4K. From a couch distance of 9-10 feet the ideal TV is 110"-120" and at 3840x2160 resolution it's good enough for vision down to 20/14. There may even be a very weak case for 8K, but I think only a few exceptions would ever see the difference. Even at 84" and 20/20 vision you start seeing the difference if you sit closer than 11 feet, and like the link says that's half the 60-70 year olds and most younger than that.
The HDMI 1.4 specification wasnt even finalized until 2009, so nobody was even considering producing more than 1600p before then, so good luck finding > 1600p content.
And when they moved from NTSC/DVD to HDTV/BluRay, none of that old content was available in HD.... oh wait, it was. For example here is a list of some of the 4K Digital Cinema releases dating back to 2004. Granted, it's probably not that many but the lack of a 4K consumer standard didn't stop them filming in 4K.
The LG is a QuadHD display, which is another shit marketing term since HD is specified by resolution and not pixel count.
Well, QHD was already taken by quarter HD = 960x540, nobody calls that half HD to make it sound bigger so I doubt you can blame marketing for that one. When comparing sizes for consumers then QuadHD = like 4 FullHD screens makes far more sense.
The desktop doesn't know what caused the changes, so you could run into a lot of strange issues. Imagine you lay out your desktop on a 30" 2560x1440 monitor, then switch to a 1920x1080 monitor and added/removed/moved an icon. What happens when you reattach the first monitor, should everything just "snap back" to the places it had - even if you'd arranged your icons completely differently now? To me the solution outlined here seems much smarter, just let the game have it's own "screen" with its own settings, no need to even tell the other windows about it.
It takes a lot of discipline to take an idea from a post on USENET in 1991 to what Linux is today. His discipline and stewardship is worth way more than any code that he contributed to the cause.
Later perhaps, but not the first few years. According to online sources Linus had the copyright on about 2% of the early 2.6.x kernel and it was 5.2 MLOC, meaning 104 kLOC is written by Linux himself and those are mostly the "core" parts not arch/driver-specific code. The GNU/Hurd project had plenty stewards, but they had no doers quite like Linus.
Why do you think Linus' influence over the kernel - and nothing but the kernel - has stopped Linux distributions from 'replacing' Windows for 'average people'?
Emphasis mine. Linus is not responsible for the state of Gnome, KDE, Unity, X11, OpenGL and so on. How much does that matter? Well you can look at the desktop market share of BSD - if you can find it - and OS X. Desktop market share is 0,1% the kernel and 99,9% everything else.
Do they need a self-opinionated little twat who writes three lines of code, bundles it with 300,000 lines of someone else's code and then names the whole lot after himself? No.
As formulated it's flamebait but seriously, you can't just pick a guy and nominate him to be the "Linus Torvalds" of your project and pretend it'll be the same. If Linus were to step down today, it doesn't matter who of the lieutenants who'd step up - they'd never have the same kind of authority to be the voice of Linux. It's the difference between being the founder like Jobs or Gates and your run-of-the-mill CEO. Even if your on top of the organization chart, you're not the benevolent dictator for life.
locked down devices don't do what people who actually use them (as opposed to just play with them) need them to.
Locked down devices do exactly as much as the people who sell them want them to do, everything from a G-rated kids tablet to to fully automated and unvetted signing with only a banhammer lurking. I think you meant to say "The current locked down devices don't do what I want" because what that means isn't fixed and most people get a lot of "real work" done on business computers even more locked down than the Apple, no jumping on the app store and installing random software there. In fact you're the equivalent of a sudo user with rather generous permissions yet still you claim there's no way anyone could possibly get anything done. Never mind all the people who are the residential version of pure MS Office users, they just need Facebook and a few more gizmos and they're happy. They're "users" even if you think their use is trivial.
I agree there. The plot could have been made a whole lot more palatable if they'd used the Guardian of Forever to "reboot" rather than <shudder>red matter<shudder>.
But using "Particle of the day" to do it is sooooooo Star Trek Canon:D
my work satisfaction tends to be proportionate to quality of the legacy code I have to work with
My work satisfaction tends to be proportionate to how much I get paid and how nice the other people are.
Good for you, different strokes for different folks. Personally I would be extremely frustrated at work if I felt lost in a kafkaesque maze of bad code where solving the most trivial bug is an exercise in traversing ten layers of "enterprise" abstractions with misleading names and hidden side effects written by a spattering of random contractors and lowest bidding outsourcing companies with no overall design or architecture. Doesn't matter if the pay is good, the people are nice, if I feel I'm pouring effort into it and two drops of results come out the other side I'd not survive in that job for long. For sure getting paid and getting along is important but one of the main drivers for my happiness at work is feeling productive, doesn't matter if I drown in meetings or bureaucracy or bizarre logic if I can't get much done I'm not happy. YMMV.
Same thing for why the position is vacant. Heck, it's practically the first words out of any interviewer's mouth, "Why are you leaving/did you leave your previous job?" How is this not an equally valid question for a potential employee?
Well unless they fired the last guy the employee left the company, not the other way around. People leave for all sorts of personal reasons that don't really tell me anything useful, so you'll only get any job-related reasons they'd like to tell you about anyway. Remember that hiring is a cost for the company, it's not in their interest to hire people that feel tricked or disappointed with the job and will leave again shortly so most of them are fairly open to discussing if this is a good match. Note that it only applies when talking to actual employees or management in the company though, not their hired recruitment agencies. They want to get you hired and cash their bonus.
Pirates pirate... period. If they want to play free games, they are going to. (...) Piracy is such an easy problem to solve...
What then, give away the games? Sure that'd solve piracy in a sense, just like consenting to sex will prevent you getting raped.
Oh wait... You're selling the console for less than it costs to make it so you can lock in customers and then screw them with overpriced games? Well shit... I think you just figured out why people are trying to pirate your software.
Nobody put a gun to their head and told them to get a console instead of a PC. It has been proven time and time again that consumers don't like up front costs, they want cheap printers and expensive ink. Or actually they don't like any costs so they want cheap hardware, free games and a pony. If any of the silly self-justification you make up was true, why is then piracy rampant on platforms that aren't locked down too?
Sure, it may work well and it may be well written. But its cheaper to tack new features on the side. It starts off being cheaper for the first few rounds, until the quality of the code suffers, then there is never enough time or budget to fix/rewrite it.
Not to mention risk, because there's code that'll break. For example let's take a conflict I once had where the database guidelines said table name + "Id" was the primary key, while the other column names would be defined by an external standard. Works great with lots of legacy code written until the standard defines a field $fooId in table $foo and we have two conflicting definitions. Simple case of namespace collision, trivial to solve with a prefix right? Unless you realize you can either break all the code that assumes column name == field in standard or all the code that assumes table name + "Id" == table identifier. And you know such "basic" logic won't have test cases, it'll just randomly break some code here, some procedures there, reports will fail and trying to build an exhaustive list is an exercise in futility.
Chances are they'll do some kind of low risk hack like rename that field $fooId2 since there's nothing using that field yet since it's new and just hack whatever is using it. But then you've just created a booby trap for everyone else, like say code that's trying to auto-generate/update the table structure from new versions of the standard. No special case, push into system, system goes boom. What's worse is that hacks have a tendency to multiply, if you do that once then people will think that's an okay way to solve their problems and before you know it you'll have a dozen places your code will break if you "do it right". Sadly the only code that'd be easy to rewrite is the code that doesn't need rewriting.
I am typing this on a Phenom II 6-core system. It is quiet, 45 watts (...) - 45 watts
I guess if the facts don't support your argument, make something up. All the Phenom II 6-core CPUs have either 95W or 125W TDP. But yes, the X6 was a quite competitive chip by offering you 50% more cores for about the same money as an Intel quad. Anandtech's conclusion did have a prelude to what was coming though:
You start running into problems when you look at lightly threaded applications or mixed workloads that aren't always stressing all six cores. In these situations Intel's quad-core Lynnfield processors (Core i5 700 series and Core i7 800 series) are better buys. They give you better performance in these light or mixed workload scenarios, not to mention lower overall power consumption.
Let's look at what has happened since 2010: Cinebench R10 single-threaded: Intel Core i5 750: 4238 Intel Core i5 3570K: 6557 AMD Phenom II X6 1090T: 3958 AMD FX-8350: 4319 Intel has improved 55%. AMD? 9%.
Load power consumption: Intel Core i5 750 (95W TDP): 140W Intel Core i7 3570K (77W TDP): 101W AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (125W TDP): 201W AMD FX-8350 (125W TDP): 195W Intel has improved 28%. AMD? 3%. And Intel includes an IGP in those 77W, AMD doesn't.
If this was a boxing match, I'd say Intel is throwing all the punches and AMD is taking them. Even if both are on their feet, one of them is in really big trouble.
You are missing an importan point when it comes to "money is on the line". No one in their right mind would use a desktop processor from Intel for anything critical. Why? All non-xeon processors have been crippled to not support ecc memory. If money really is on the line there is just no way that is acceptable.
Well if it's critical then I wouldn't want to use a desktop processor or system in any case, then you should get a proper Opteron/Xeon server with all the validation and redundancy and managed environment. As for the general employee, I've yet to see anyone working on a "workstation" class machine. Unless they need the horsepower for CAD or something like that my impression is that 99.9% from the receptionist to the CEO use regular non-ECC desktops/laptops to do their work and I'm pretty sure that means money is on the line. Of course it could be that we live in an insane world, but I think the risk of someone making a disastrous typo is equal or greater than the risks of a bit flip.
I think the biggest factor for your home desktop is noise - it takes a lot more airflow to remove 125W of heat than 77W of heat. In Anandtech's tests he actually measures 195W versus 120W total system power consumption. Sure it might not matter much if you plan to put a noisy 200W+ graphics card or two in it, but for non-gamer use I'd say that's pretty significant.
Not dead, but if they're having to sell a chip with twice as many transistors as an i7 for two thirds of the price, they must be spraying blood all over the room.
Twice as many transistors? No, it's 1.2B versus Ivy Bridge's 1.4B - but the die size is almost double, 315mm^2 to 160mm^2. That is both because Intel is on a 22nm process and because they have higher transistor density, Intel's 32nm Sandy Bridge has 1.16B transistors but is only 216mm^2. I guess die size is one of the many things AMD didn't have the time or resources to optimize for and yes they're going to hurt selling these chips for $200 and down.
Too late for that now... first attempt Android phones, losing the exclusivity money from Microsoft, yet more customers who feel abandoned, all the bridges to business partners they've already burned? No, perhaps earlier they could have sailed in a different direction but now they're in the middle of the storm and just have to tie themselves to the mast and either float or sink. I'm thinking sink but abandoning ship for the life boat now would just be even worse. It's no coincidence that Apple starts taking preorders for iPad 4 and the iPad mini on the 26th, same day as Win8 is released - they're now going to try to steal as much of the launch day thunder as possible. I bet they're looking for headlines like "Win8 released, 100 million preorder iPads".
Yep, I checked a little and the instruction decoder was about 5% of the die space on the first Pentiums, which means it'll take up 0.01% on a Ivy Bridge quad core. Even if you adjust for Even if you look at an Atom and adjust for the instruction set being much larger with 64 extensions, SSE etc. it'll still take up zero point something percent on a modern CPU.
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Well, I can sort of see why the law doesn't want to let you go jurisdiction shopping. If US law says any copy legally made under foreign law is equal to one made under US law then you can pick any one of 165+ copyright laws (Berne convention, more if any country) that is most favorable to you. Like in this case, I'm sure what they're worried about is that you can make an online shop and say the manufacture and sale happens outside the US, it is only delivered to the US which circumvents any local law.
AMD is not by any stretch of the imagination doing fine. Last year after Q3 they had an operating income (note: not total income) of 297 million. This year they have a 634 million operating loss.
I realized that under GAAP rules their one-time payoff to GlobalFoundries earlier this year was counted as "Operating Cost, Other" and that was 703 million so their daily operations are not that screwed. But now in the last quarter they had a real operating loss, even AMDs "Adjusted EBITDA" was negative. Guess it's too long between I read financial reports.
Or even the same audience at different times. I've played Angry Birds a lot on the road - it's rather hard to bring a full console/PC to play on the bus. It doesn't mean I want to play it at home where I got a full gaming rig. My willingness to pay is also very different, on my phone I just want "pass the time" games and there's plenty $1 offerings that do that, while at home I'm spending my leisure time and I want high quality entertainment. I'm not looking to just pass the time until it's time to go back to work again.
The company (not necessarily AMD) may be doing fine but the uppity-ups found that they could be more profitable eliminating X jobs
AMD is not by any stretch of the imagination doing fine. Last year after Q3 they had an operating income (note: not total income) of 297 million. This year they have a 634 million operating loss. That's a lot for a company with 4612 million in assets. What's worse is where they're going
a) Revenue is down - they sell less
b) Gross margin is down - they make less per sale
c) R&D is down - a little but they're behind already
d) Accounts receivable is down - orders are down
e) Inventory is piling up - can it be sold?
That's my economist's hat. My strategist's hat is telling me that where AMD has done best lately with APUs is going to be dead center in the upcoming war with Chipzilla on one side and ARM selling billions of smart phones and tablets on the other side. Both sides will be pouring money into R&D. Both sides will cut margins to win the market. If I was AMD I'd feel about as comfortable as Poland stuck between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Sovet Union in the late 30s.
The tech nerd in me really wants AMD to bounce back and fight it off, but I'm having big difficulty finding the right shade of rosy colored glasses to make it possible. I just hope AMD the CPU company doesn't drag AMD the GPU company down with them, because their graphics cards are still pretty competitive to nVidia.
Well it's a 84" TV, the only 1920x1080 resolution TV I know of with equal or greater size is Sharp's 90" LCD which also has a $10k price tag. In that sense $17k is not bad for 6 less inches and 4 times the pixels. For monitors Intel has predicted 4K monitors for 2013, they've upgraded Ivy Bridge with 4K support and video acceleration (over two cables) and Haswell will support 4K over one cable. I bet they're not doing this without good hints from Apple, who probably won't let their MBPs have better resolution than their iMac/Mac Pros for long. Applications and photos will benefit, 4K video is a bit off but JVC has a $5000 3840x2160p camcorder today - if they can get it down a few thousand into the "prosumer" market suddenly 4K can seem useful even if Hollywood is busy planning new DRM for their UHD discs.
Does the definition of 20/20 vision really mix imperial and metric units?
No, the definition is a visual acuity of one arc minute (1/60th of a degree). When you figure out how much that is at 20 feet you can use any unit you want.
1. It is not the ideal angle, it's the worst seat in the cinema that can call itself "THX recommended" - very big difference. What most people would call an ideal seat in the middle of the cinema is well in to the 40s with the closest seat - which most people find too close - over 50 degrees. Then again that is also because those seats are so far down so you have vertical issues looking at the screen, but no doubt there's a thing as too close.
2. Here's a quote: "Dr. Colenbrander also emphasizes that, contrary to popular belief, 20/20 is not actually normal or average, let alone perfect, acuity. Snellen, he says, established it is a reference standard. Normal acuity in healthy adults is one or two lines better. Average acuity in a population sample does not drop to the 20/20 level until age 60 or 70. This explains the existence of the two lines smaller than 20/20: 20/15 and 20/10."
Both taken together there's a pretty good case for 4K. From a couch distance of 9-10 feet the ideal TV is 110"-120" and at 3840x2160 resolution it's good enough for vision down to 20/14. There may even be a very weak case for 8K, but I think only a few exceptions would ever see the difference. Even at 84" and 20/20 vision you start seeing the difference if you sit closer than 11 feet, and like the link says that's half the 60-70 year olds and most younger than that.
The HDMI 1.4 specification wasnt even finalized until 2009, so nobody was even considering producing more than 1600p before then, so good luck finding > 1600p content.
And when they moved from NTSC/DVD to HDTV/BluRay, none of that old content was available in HD.... oh wait, it was. For example here is a list of some of the 4K Digital Cinema releases dating back to 2004. Granted, it's probably not that many but the lack of a 4K consumer standard didn't stop them filming in 4K.
The LG is a QuadHD display, which is another shit marketing term since HD is specified by resolution and not pixel count.
Well, QHD was already taken by quarter HD = 960x540, nobody calls that half HD to make it sound bigger so I doubt you can blame marketing for that one. When comparing sizes for consumers then QuadHD = like 4 FullHD screens makes far more sense.
The desktop doesn't know what caused the changes, so you could run into a lot of strange issues. Imagine you lay out your desktop on a 30" 2560x1440 monitor, then switch to a 1920x1080 monitor and added/removed/moved an icon. What happens when you reattach the first monitor, should everything just "snap back" to the places it had - even if you'd arranged your icons completely differently now? To me the solution outlined here seems much smarter, just let the game have it's own "screen" with its own settings, no need to even tell the other windows about it.
It takes a lot of discipline to take an idea from a post on USENET in 1991 to what Linux is today. His discipline and stewardship is worth way more than any code that he contributed to the cause.
Later perhaps, but not the first few years. According to online sources Linus had the copyright on about 2% of the early 2.6.x kernel and it was 5.2 MLOC, meaning 104 kLOC is written by Linux himself and those are mostly the "core" parts not arch/driver-specific code. The GNU/Hurd project had plenty stewards, but they had no doers quite like Linus.
Why do you think Linus' influence over the kernel - and nothing but the kernel - has stopped Linux distributions from 'replacing' Windows for 'average people'?
Emphasis mine. Linus is not responsible for the state of Gnome, KDE, Unity, X11, OpenGL and so on. How much does that matter? Well you can look at the desktop market share of BSD - if you can find it - and OS X. Desktop market share is 0,1% the kernel and 99,9% everything else.
Do they need a self-opinionated little twat who writes three lines of code, bundles it with 300,000 lines of someone else's code and then names the whole lot after himself? No.
As formulated it's flamebait but seriously, you can't just pick a guy and nominate him to be the "Linus Torvalds" of your project and pretend it'll be the same. If Linus were to step down today, it doesn't matter who of the lieutenants who'd step up - they'd never have the same kind of authority to be the voice of Linux. It's the difference between being the founder like Jobs or Gates and your run-of-the-mill CEO. Even if your on top of the organization chart, you're not the benevolent dictator for life.
locked down devices don't do what people who actually use them (as opposed to just play with them) need them to.
Locked down devices do exactly as much as the people who sell them want them to do, everything from a G-rated kids tablet to to fully automated and unvetted signing with only a banhammer lurking. I think you meant to say "The current locked down devices don't do what I want" because what that means isn't fixed and most people get a lot of "real work" done on business computers even more locked down than the Apple, no jumping on the app store and installing random software there. In fact you're the equivalent of a sudo user with rather generous permissions yet still you claim there's no way anyone could possibly get anything done. Never mind all the people who are the residential version of pure MS Office users, they just need Facebook and a few more gizmos and they're happy. They're "users" even if you think their use is trivial.
I agree there. The plot could have been made a whole lot more palatable if they'd used the Guardian of Forever to "reboot" rather than <shudder>red matter<shudder>.
But using "Particle of the day" to do it is sooooooo Star Trek Canon :D
my work satisfaction tends to be proportionate to quality of the legacy code I have to work with
My work satisfaction tends to be proportionate to how much I get paid and how nice the other people are.
Good for you, different strokes for different folks. Personally I would be extremely frustrated at work if I felt lost in a kafkaesque maze of bad code where solving the most trivial bug is an exercise in traversing ten layers of "enterprise" abstractions with misleading names and hidden side effects written by a spattering of random contractors and lowest bidding outsourcing companies with no overall design or architecture. Doesn't matter if the pay is good, the people are nice, if I feel I'm pouring effort into it and two drops of results come out the other side I'd not survive in that job for long. For sure getting paid and getting along is important but one of the main drivers for my happiness at work is feeling productive, doesn't matter if I drown in meetings or bureaucracy or bizarre logic if I can't get much done I'm not happy. YMMV.
Same thing for why the position is vacant. Heck, it's practically the first words out of any interviewer's mouth, "Why are you leaving/did you leave your previous job?" How is this not an equally valid question for a potential employee?
Well unless they fired the last guy the employee left the company, not the other way around. People leave for all sorts of personal reasons that don't really tell me anything useful, so you'll only get any job-related reasons they'd like to tell you about anyway. Remember that hiring is a cost for the company, it's not in their interest to hire people that feel tricked or disappointed with the job and will leave again shortly so most of them are fairly open to discussing if this is a good match. Note that it only applies when talking to actual employees or management in the company though, not their hired recruitment agencies. They want to get you hired and cash their bonus.
Pirates pirate... period. If they want to play free games, they are going to. (...) Piracy is such an easy problem to solve...
What then, give away the games? Sure that'd solve piracy in a sense, just like consenting to sex will prevent you getting raped.
Oh wait... You're selling the console for less than it costs to make it so you can lock in customers and then screw them with overpriced games? Well shit... I think you just figured out why people are trying to pirate your software.
Nobody put a gun to their head and told them to get a console instead of a PC. It has been proven time and time again that consumers don't like up front costs, they want cheap printers and expensive ink. Or actually they don't like any costs so they want cheap hardware, free games and a pony. If any of the silly self-justification you make up was true, why is then piracy rampant on platforms that aren't locked down too?
Sure, it may work well and it may be well written. But its cheaper to tack new features on the side. It starts off being cheaper for the first few rounds, until the quality of the code suffers, then there is never enough time or budget to fix/rewrite it.
Not to mention risk, because there's code that'll break. For example let's take a conflict I once had where the database guidelines said table name + "Id" was the primary key, while the other column names would be defined by an external standard. Works great with lots of legacy code written until the standard defines a field $fooId in table $foo and we have two conflicting definitions. Simple case of namespace collision, trivial to solve with a prefix right? Unless you realize you can either break all the code that assumes column name == field in standard or all the code that assumes table name + "Id" == table identifier. And you know such "basic" logic won't have test cases, it'll just randomly break some code here, some procedures there, reports will fail and trying to build an exhaustive list is an exercise in futility.
Chances are they'll do some kind of low risk hack like rename that field $fooId2 since there's nothing using that field yet since it's new and just hack whatever is using it. But then you've just created a booby trap for everyone else, like say code that's trying to auto-generate/update the table structure from new versions of the standard. No special case, push into system, system goes boom. What's worse is that hacks have a tendency to multiply, if you do that once then people will think that's an okay way to solve their problems and before you know it you'll have a dozen places your code will break if you "do it right". Sadly the only code that'd be easy to rewrite is the code that doesn't need rewriting.
I am typing this on a Phenom II 6-core system. It is quiet, 45 watts (...) - 45 watts
I guess if the facts don't support your argument, make something up. All the Phenom II 6-core CPUs have either 95W or 125W TDP. But yes, the X6 was a quite competitive chip by offering you 50% more cores for about the same money as an Intel quad. Anandtech's conclusion did have a prelude to what was coming though:
You start running into problems when you look at lightly threaded applications or mixed workloads that aren't always stressing all six cores. In these situations Intel's quad-core Lynnfield processors (Core i5 700 series and Core i7 800 series) are better buys. They give you better performance in these light or mixed workload scenarios, not to mention lower overall power consumption.
Let's look at what has happened since 2010:
Cinebench R10 single-threaded:
Intel Core i5 750: 4238
Intel Core i5 3570K: 6557
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T: 3958
AMD FX-8350: 4319
Intel has improved 55%. AMD? 9%.
Load power consumption:
Intel Core i5 750 (95W TDP): 140W
Intel Core i7 3570K (77W TDP): 101W
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (125W TDP): 201W
AMD FX-8350 (125W TDP): 195W
Intel has improved 28%. AMD? 3%. And Intel includes an IGP in those 77W, AMD doesn't.
If this was a boxing match, I'd say Intel is throwing all the punches and AMD is taking them. Even if both are on their feet, one of them is in really big trouble.
You are missing an importan point when it comes to "money is on the line". No one in their right mind would use a desktop processor from Intel for anything critical. Why? All non-xeon processors have been crippled to not support ecc memory. If money really is on the line there is just no way that is acceptable.
Well if it's critical then I wouldn't want to use a desktop processor or system in any case, then you should get a proper Opteron/Xeon server with all the validation and redundancy and managed environment. As for the general employee, I've yet to see anyone working on a "workstation" class machine. Unless they need the horsepower for CAD or something like that my impression is that 99.9% from the receptionist to the CEO use regular non-ECC desktops/laptops to do their work and I'm pretty sure that means money is on the line. Of course it could be that we live in an insane world, but I think the risk of someone making a disastrous typo is equal or greater than the risks of a bit flip.
I think the biggest factor for your home desktop is noise - it takes a lot more airflow to remove 125W of heat than 77W of heat. In Anandtech's tests he actually measures 195W versus 120W total system power consumption. Sure it might not matter much if you plan to put a noisy 200W+ graphics card or two in it, but for non-gamer use I'd say that's pretty significant.
Not dead, but if they're having to sell a chip with twice as many transistors as an i7 for two thirds of the price, they must be spraying blood all over the room.
Twice as many transistors? No, it's 1.2B versus Ivy Bridge's 1.4B - but the die size is almost double, 315mm^2 to 160mm^2. That is both because Intel is on a 22nm process and because they have higher transistor density, Intel's 32nm Sandy Bridge has 1.16B transistors but is only 216mm^2. I guess die size is one of the many things AMD didn't have the time or resources to optimize for and yes they're going to hurt selling these chips for $200 and down.
Too late for that now... first attempt Android phones, losing the exclusivity money from Microsoft, yet more customers who feel abandoned, all the bridges to business partners they've already burned? No, perhaps earlier they could have sailed in a different direction but now they're in the middle of the storm and just have to tie themselves to the mast and either float or sink. I'm thinking sink but abandoning ship for the life boat now would just be even worse. It's no coincidence that Apple starts taking preorders for iPad 4 and the iPad mini on the 26th, same day as Win8 is released - they're now going to try to steal as much of the launch day thunder as possible. I bet they're looking for headlines like "Win8 released, 100 million preorder iPads".
Yep, I checked a little and the instruction decoder was about 5% of the die space on the first Pentiums, which means it'll take up 0.01% on a Ivy Bridge quad core. Even if you adjust for Even if you look at an Atom and adjust for the instruction set being much larger with 64 extensions, SSE etc. it'll still take up zero point something percent on a modern CPU.