Although I understand and share the fear for the misused narrator, I'm not sure how it would work otherwise for Robotech / Macross (whichever version they want to present).
With the timeline of the series, it would be very difficult to handle the necessary exposition otherwise. Even the lamest narrator is preferable to the Asimovian-style dialogues that plague SF movies otherwise.
Even so, I cannot help but be skeptical about this effort, even if they restricted themselves to the Macross 'age'.
Cramming the story and universe into a 2-hour development would normally work much better if you can make some assumptions on the context available to the audience (before or after the movie) - but this is not as mainstream as the X-men or Serenity (for example), so it could feel very rushed and background gaps would be seen as 'the movie does not make sense', rather than 'there is a rich universe in the background they didn't have time to expose'.
Trilogies would be a hard-sell, but I'd actually prefer to see this as a mini-series. Then you'd have the time and scope for character AND historical development - and you could do away with narrators, expository monologues, etc. and use more visual ways to connect and move the story along.
Whichever way they go, I do hope they avoid making their interpretation a Battlestar-Galactica clone. There are enough parallels to make that tempting, and I imagine that's one of the reasons that would move the project forward at this point.
Well, nothing is all about efficiency. It's always a balance of efficiency and effectiveness.
Prisons, like any other organized endeavor, is ALL about efficiency and effectiveness to accomplish X goal. The question is what is X: Is it controlling and rehabilitating dangerous people, integrating them back into society? Or is it punishing such people and locking them out of society permanently?
I don't see the logical fallacy you claim.
OF COURSE it can be argued that the government paying someone else to do any job more effectively and efficiently (and turn a profit) can be cheaper than doing it themselves. The world economy has been built on such arrangements long before Adam Smith, and government itself is such an arrangement!
What is silly is to assume that the job is NECESSARILY cheaper or more effective just because it is being done outside of the goverment.
For that to be true you would need to have: - Healthy and open competition - if there is an advantage in privatization, is opening the doors for different businesses to find better ways of doing things as they compete with each other. - The government being a VERY demanding customer with clear (non-budgetary) goals - effectiveness in accomplishing the goal is driven by the customer's interest. efficiency by the business'. - Good accountability, short-term and long-term, on both sides - the government's requirements need to match society's, and the businesses need to be accountable for results against those requirements.
Sadly, it is rare that any measures are taken to ensure any of those things, and you can end up with a government-sponsored monopoly with no mandate to serve the customer. This is typically not better than the original government monopoly, for pretty much the same reasons.
I'll reiterate my point:
Businesses in a free market are a great machine to fulfill customer requirements at the least possible cost. But when government fails catastrophically in the first place, it is typically a problem of effectiveness, not efficiency. I think this is most often because the customer's (society's) needs are not really that clear or the primary goals of the process anymore.
Moving the problem between public and private hands at that point will accomplish little.
That's what happens when things that are government funded are "privatized" by sub-contracting them to private companies, but the payment, the measures of efficiency and accountabilities are still the same as a social enterprise controlled by the government.
I think when we consider that these issues 'should' be private, or 'should' be socially funded as a matter of principle we ignore the fundamental problems.
Neither 'private enterprises' nor 'social institutions' are fairy dust that anoint an organization with the qualities of efficiency and efficacy. Their respective benefits and deficits are a matter of methodology, not political taxonomy.
The promise of privatization is to enlist capitalistic self-interest in optimizing a service. This actually works very well in the market, because the private enterprises are accountable to their consumers. Their cash flow depends enough on their reliable satisfaction of the customer needs, so that 'preserving your cash flow' by defrauding your customers tends to be suicidal.
But the main reason that works is a shorter distance of accountability: companies are directly accountable to their customers' satisfaction (in terms of revenue). So they optimize to minimize cost while maximizing that satisfaction. The point of democracy and representation is the same after all.
If your efficiency/effectiveness problems with a large government institution are due to lack of accountability (and I think that is most frequently the case), privatization can theoretically either increase or shorten the distance of accountability.
Most often we just increase that distance and make things worse: you put a middle-man customer (the government), and moved the responsibility farther away... and then allow private self-interest to optimize the service with the middle-man's satisfaction (based on its own self-interest) as the bar.
Heh. I'd have to disagree with you on the wants of parents, but I guess I'm more cynical than some - the success of television, and in turn videogames, is because parents DO want their children to spend countless hours in a known location, on a known passive activity, that requires minimal attention on their part and carries no/low physical risk.
What the Wii provides, though, is a game experience that the non-gamer parents (and others) can understand and engage in. Once again they can use 'buying it for the kids' as an excuse, rather than the painful truth that is demonstrated one each embarrassing attempt at using the device.
I doubt that happened very often in families since the days of arcade and Atari / Intellivision / etc. Picking up GTA3 / Halo is not the same thing in terms of time-commitment: both skills and culture require some time investment to be barely competent, let alone enjoy the game.
I do find the target demographic argument being funny: if your target demographic doesn't buy your product, and a bigger demographic does... well, Hello, New Target Demographic!
Which is why he mentioned 'fix it in a high-level language such as Python', I imagine. There are no shortage of high-level language that provide complete threading control - including Python, Java, C# or for that matter even VB.NET.
That is, assuming the issue is a highly parallelizable problem in the first place.
The thread doesn't really seem to indicate that, since the topic had changed to the usual 'new coders are not hardcore' rant. Rather, it is very probable performance concerns were the typical concerns about memory use and going through COM for everything.
The market isn't shifting to casual games, it's growing to include them. Things might look a little strange right now because publishers are testing the waters a bit, but it'll balance out soon enough. Valve isn't going to abandon Half-life to make bejeweled clones, there will be plenty of MMO's and RPG's in the future. There's not much to worry about.
I don't know if it is something to worry about, but perhaps Valve would see it logical, business-wise, to abandon Half-life to make bejeweled clones, along with a lot of 'hardcore gamer' shops.
Why wouldn't they? Current 'hardcore games' seems a risky proposition - high investment (time + money), extremely competitive, short lifespan on the market per release...
If casual games promises a much bigger market, where you can sell cheaper (to make) games at a lower risk, with higher profit margins... it would make perfect business sense to focus on making those games. Just like right now it makes a lot of sense to focus on making MMOs than on making the next Doom.
Is this a funny troll? I'm having difficulty believing these two phrases were put in the same post without ironical intent:
It seems that acting indignant and making fun of the other side has all but replaced sober discourse.
Because of course...
The idea wasn't to convert the enemy to being gay; it was to make them all uncontrollably horny... that they couldn't fight.
How on earth could you have a sober discourse about that? I'd think if there is anything that could unite the different viewpoints on homosexuality, it's laughing at the absurdity of this proposal.
Re:Changes over time?
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Risking someone else's sleepless nights is not a matter of genius and guts, or avoiding bureaucracy.
It is a matter of being an asshole, genius or not.
I agree with you about the 9-5, and the need to grasp inspiration on the spot to keep creativity alive. But that is no excuse to trample over other people's work without asking for their permission / collaboration.
You may be very convinced of your own genius and inventiveness. Good for you. But you might as well be destroying more important, time-consuming, work by other geniuses in the room.
If you don't have the guts to work the extra sleepless night setting up your own experiment, or (gasp) actually asking for the help if needed, then you really didn't deserve to find the answer.
If you cannot measure success, how do you know it works?
I'm not sure if this is the cheapest way to get the best measurements, but if we're going to invest seriously on technology to control global warming, having objective measurements to track the results is vital.
Otherwise, knee-jerk reactions, politics and PR will control which green-technologies become mainstream, if any.
The problem is that for a layman, the level/relevance of the ignorance may not be that clear in advance. A judge may legitimately think they have a pretty good idea of what a website or email is. These days, it is very likely they have direct experience with both as end-users, and they may think that layman knowledge is enough.
From TFA, there is not enough context to know, but as other posters have pointed out, if there are questions on location or implementation details, the basics for an end-user may not be enough.
Who owns and is responsible for what, and what is the source of which content, may not be as obvious as a layman would expect (as evidenced by phishing / malware scams), yet terribly important in this case.
A website is a collection of urls... grouped by what?
Is a website unit a domain? A sub-domain? A directory? A virtual directory? If I have a web-application co-hosted under a domain as foo.bar.com/me/, is my website? Or is it the domain owner's? What if I have a subdomain as me.foo.bar.com? What if I do not have that, but the domain owner fakes it through url rewrites? Does that make a difference?
I wouldn't be surprised if prosecution and defense have different assumptions on these and other unasked questions, which only become clear when the judge starts wondering if they're both talking of the same thing.
Remember how direct mail orders killed the retail business? Companies could cut the middle-man and allow customers to buy from them directly, as long as they were aware of the company, and had their mail address, and were willing to fill up a mail order form and a check and send it to them.
Right...
There is a value proposition in a centralized marketplace for this content - exposure their user base, facilitate impulse buys, all sorts of nice things which include most of the reasons malls still exist.
Providing the content on their own website has a lot of advantages too - not the least that perhaps people might have a reason to go to nbc.com.
But the big difference is that they have more leverage to use against the middle-man on negotiations. "Look, it's not like you are our only choice. If we don't like the deal, we'll just take our content home and play by ourselves.".
This is less in line with "online video stores have no future", and more in line with "CEOs of online video stores may have to stop comparing the children of content-producer executives to ugly-bulldogs-after-a-car-accident".
I'm not sure, how does the cap on payment prevent exploitation of the poor?
It seems that historically that only results in them being paid less (according to the cap), and misled through misinformation about both the risks and the compensation.
Wish I had mod points this time: you raise what I think is a most important point.
The same thing applies to most other forms of written material: text normally has a different rythm, and often requires a different focus for good reason - most great works of literature would range from annoying to soporific if parsed as spoken language, but they're interesting and enjoyable in their form. They're also far less enjoyable if read with the same level of concentration we give when listening to spoken language - which may be an argument for the brain being wired to multitask better when parsing information as sound... or for modern lack of listening skills.
Actually, exploiting the positive effects of reformatting text is not really that new. We have been doing that with poetry and math for thousands of years, and many writers have played with similar formatting for experimental reasons. As someone pointed out elsewhere, this is what we do for code too.
I'm not aware of good research on the subject, however. So there may be real innovation on their part on developing a formal theory and engineering a method for consistent results.
I have no doubt that using this system would improve results in standarized tests, because short pieces of superficial information (and the style of modern magazine articles) seem very appropriate targets. But I think the impression of improvement may be misleading. I wonder what long term effects would it have on the literacy levels if we adopt this as a general solution blindly.
Although we know of bacteria adapted to very extreme conditions on the planet, I doubt these are the same bacteria adapted to human hosts on temperate environments. The variations in environment conditions is most likely what would kill them, not the extremity of those at any particular moment.
If it is on par with Flash now, that would be great. But if it requires installation of the J2SE runtime, I don't know if we can call it 'on par'.
Flash has always been faster and more transparent to install on the spot, if you didn't have it. I haven't been following Java as closely for a while, but last I checked, installing the latest runtime was a much bigger pain - in terms of both bandwidth and user experience.
This was one among many reasons people still targeted applets to 1.2 for an embarrasingly long time (I don't mean just targetting AWT, I mean collections and other core stuff).
If you're organization is so dynamic that your org. chart NEEDs to be generated at runtime by a script on your web server, then maybe writing perl scripts to auto-generate org charts shouldn't be your highest priority.
That new business is going to come from MySQL's reputation of being a public company, not based on the technological superiority or suitability about the product. Should MySQL indeed care for such customers, given that the current mindshare and marketshate has come from the Open Source loving community?
You're suggesting that a for-profit business refuses to serve new paying customers... because they're 'n00bs'?
What is this, the Soup Nazi school of open source business?
In these days of global warming, and all the mass hysteria about it, and companies/governments trying to reduce carbon emissions... We have microsoft, come out with a new hugely bloated OS that will result in lots of old computers being dumped, and will consume far more electricity than previous versions. Microsoft aren't doing their bit to reduce global warming, they are making the problem much worse.
Interesting. Care to share any hard data supporting that?
Are you aware of any bugs, or any benchmarks that indicate the contrary?
I've heard/read about people claiming that the power-management changes confusing and/or overhyped, but I don't think I've read of any supported claims that Vista consumes more electricity than XP on the same hardware so far.
It would be a shame if after what, 4 or 5 years? of being a strong competitor, AMD loses focus on what is relevant in the market and just keeps making faster, more power-hungry, CPUs.
The last thing we need is for Intel to have no real competitors. Innovation would slow and prices would hike up.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the moderation conundrum:
Should this be +1 Funny for using the words "my girlfriend" in Slashdot, or does the lameness of the other joke cancel it out?
Now Drax Industries knows that they know, and he can move the plan forward and prepare a surprise for the inevitable arrival of the marines.
It would have been so much better if they had sent a single British operative to deal with the situation discreetly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonraker_(film)
It is all about international cooperation in the war against terror.
Although I understand and share the fear for the misused narrator, I'm not sure how it would work otherwise for Robotech / Macross (whichever version they want to present).
With the timeline of the series, it would be very difficult to handle the necessary exposition otherwise.
Even the lamest narrator is preferable to the Asimovian-style dialogues that plague SF movies otherwise.
Even so, I cannot help but be skeptical about this effort, even if they restricted themselves to the Macross 'age'.
Cramming the story and universe into a 2-hour development would normally work much better if you can make some assumptions on the context available to the audience (before or after the movie) - but this is not as mainstream as the X-men or Serenity (for example), so it could feel very rushed and background gaps would be seen as 'the movie does not make sense', rather than 'there is a rich universe in the background they didn't have time to expose'.
Trilogies would be a hard-sell, but I'd actually prefer to see this as a mini-series.
Then you'd have the time and scope for character AND historical development - and you could do away with narrators, expository monologues, etc. and use more visual ways to connect and move the story along.
Whichever way they go, I do hope they avoid making their interpretation a Battlestar-Galactica clone.
There are enough parallels to make that tempting, and I imagine that's one of the reasons that would move the project forward at this point.
Well, nothing is all about efficiency. It's always a balance of efficiency and effectiveness.
Prisons, like any other organized endeavor, is ALL about efficiency and effectiveness to accomplish X goal.
The question is what is X: Is it controlling and rehabilitating dangerous people, integrating them back into society?
Or is it punishing such people and locking them out of society permanently?
I don't see the logical fallacy you claim.
OF COURSE it can be argued that the government paying someone else to do any job more effectively and efficiently (and turn a profit) can be cheaper than doing it themselves. The world economy has been built on such arrangements long before Adam Smith, and government itself is such an arrangement!
What is silly is to assume that the job is NECESSARILY cheaper or more effective just because it is being done outside of the goverment.
For that to be true you would need to have:
- Healthy and open competition - if there is an advantage in privatization, is opening the doors for different businesses to find better ways of doing things as they compete with each other.
- The government being a VERY demanding customer with clear (non-budgetary) goals - effectiveness in accomplishing the goal is driven by the customer's interest. efficiency by the business'.
- Good accountability, short-term and long-term, on both sides - the government's requirements need to match society's, and the businesses need to be accountable for results against those requirements.
Sadly, it is rare that any measures are taken to ensure any of those things, and you can end up with a government-sponsored monopoly with no mandate to serve the customer. This is typically not better than the original government monopoly, for pretty much the same reasons.
I'll reiterate my point:
Businesses in a free market are a great machine to fulfill customer requirements at the least possible cost.
But when government fails catastrophically in the first place, it is typically a problem of effectiveness, not efficiency.
I think this is most often because the customer's (society's) needs are not really that clear or the primary goals of the process anymore.
Moving the problem between public and private hands at that point will accomplish little.
Well... no, not really.
That's what happens when things that are government funded are "privatized" by sub-contracting them to private companies, but the payment, the measures of efficiency and accountabilities are still the same as a social enterprise controlled by the government.
I think when we consider that these issues 'should' be private, or 'should' be socially funded as a matter of principle we ignore the fundamental problems.
Neither 'private enterprises' nor 'social institutions' are fairy dust that anoint an organization with the qualities of efficiency and efficacy. Their respective benefits and deficits are a matter of methodology, not political taxonomy.
The promise of privatization is to enlist capitalistic self-interest in optimizing a service.
This actually works very well in the market, because the private enterprises are accountable to their consumers. Their cash flow depends enough on their reliable satisfaction of the customer needs, so that 'preserving your cash flow' by defrauding your customers tends to be suicidal.
But the main reason that works is a shorter distance of accountability: companies are directly accountable to their customers' satisfaction (in terms of revenue). So they optimize to minimize cost while maximizing that satisfaction.
The point of democracy and representation is the same after all.
If your efficiency/effectiveness problems with a large government institution are due to lack of accountability (and I think that is most frequently the case), privatization can theoretically either increase or shorten the distance of accountability.
Most often we just increase that distance and make things worse: you put a middle-man customer (the government), and moved the responsibility farther away... and then allow private self-interest to optimize the service with the middle-man's satisfaction (based on its own self-interest) as the bar.
Heh. I'd have to disagree with you on the wants of parents, but I guess I'm more cynical than some - the success of television, and in turn videogames, is because parents DO want their children to spend countless hours in a known location, on a known passive activity, that requires minimal attention on their part and carries no/low physical risk.
What the Wii provides, though, is a game experience that the non-gamer parents (and others) can understand and engage in.
Once again they can use 'buying it for the kids' as an excuse, rather than the painful truth that is demonstrated one each embarrassing attempt at using the device.
I doubt that happened very often in families since the days of arcade and Atari / Intellivision / etc.
Picking up GTA3 / Halo is not the same thing in terms of time-commitment: both skills and culture require some time investment to be barely competent, let alone enjoy the game.
I do find the target demographic argument being funny: if your target demographic doesn't buy your product, and a bigger demographic does... well, Hello, New Target Demographic!
Which is why he mentioned 'fix it in a high-level language such as Python', I imagine.
There are no shortage of high-level language that provide complete threading control - including Python, Java, C# or for that matter even VB.NET.
That is, assuming the issue is a highly parallelizable problem in the first place.
The thread doesn't really seem to indicate that, since the topic had changed to the usual 'new coders are not hardcore' rant.
Rather, it is very probable performance concerns were the typical concerns about memory use and going through COM for everything.
I don't know if it is something to worry about, but perhaps Valve would see it logical, business-wise, to abandon Half-life to make bejeweled clones, along with a lot of 'hardcore gamer' shops.
Why wouldn't they? Current 'hardcore games' seems a risky proposition - high investment (time + money), extremely competitive, short lifespan on the market per release...
If casual games promises a much bigger market, where you can sell cheaper (to make) games at a lower risk, with higher profit margins... it would make perfect business sense to focus on making those games.
Just like right now it makes a lot of sense to focus on making MMOs than on making the next Doom.
I'm having difficulty believing these two phrases were put in the same post without ironical intent:
Because of course...
How on earth could you have a sober discourse about that?
I'd think if there is anything that could unite the different viewpoints on homosexuality, it's laughing at the absurdity of this proposal.
Fortunate soul.
For some of us, such traumas can merge with each other into an uncomprehensible nightmare.
Every time I watch Lynch's Dune, my brain keeps replaying all the monologues in the voice of William Shatner: "Father the. Sleeper Must. Awaken!"
I thought they were supposed to order KFC, not have hot cocoa.
But maybe that's just what went wrong with it last time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_bacon/
Risking someone else's sleepless nights is not a matter of genius and guts, or avoiding bureaucracy.
It is a matter of being an asshole, genius or not.
I agree with you about the 9-5, and the need to grasp inspiration on the spot to keep creativity alive.
But that is no excuse to trample over other people's work without asking for their permission / collaboration.
You may be very convinced of your own genius and inventiveness. Good for you.
But you might as well be destroying more important, time-consuming, work by other geniuses in the room.
If you don't have the guts to work the extra sleepless night setting up your own experiment, or (gasp) actually asking for the help if needed, then you really didn't deserve to find the answer.
If you cannot measure success, how do you know it works?
I'm not sure if this is the cheapest way to get the best measurements, but if we're going to invest seriously on technology to control global warming, having objective measurements to track the results is vital.
Otherwise, knee-jerk reactions, politics and PR will control which green-technologies become mainstream, if any.
The problem is that for a layman, the level/relevance of the ignorance may not be that clear in advance.
A judge may legitimately think they have a pretty good idea of what a website or email is. These days, it is very likely they have direct experience with both as end-users, and they may think that layman knowledge is enough.
From TFA, there is not enough context to know, but as other posters have pointed out, if there are questions on location or implementation details, the basics for an end-user may not be enough.
Who owns and is responsible for what, and what is the source of which content, may not be as obvious as a layman would expect (as evidenced by phishing / malware scams), yet terribly important in this case.
A website is a collection of urls... grouped by what?
Is a website unit a domain? A sub-domain? A directory? A virtual directory?
If I have a web-application co-hosted under a domain as foo.bar.com/me/, is my website? Or is it the domain owner's?
What if I have a subdomain as me.foo.bar.com?
What if I do not have that, but the domain owner fakes it through url rewrites? Does that make a difference?
I wouldn't be surprised if prosecution and defense have different assumptions on these and other unasked questions, which only become clear when the judge starts wondering if they're both talking of the same thing.
Remember how direct mail orders killed the retail business?
Companies could cut the middle-man and allow customers to buy from them directly, as long as they were aware of the company, and had their mail address, and were willing to fill up a mail order form and a check and send it to them.
Right...
There is a value proposition in a centralized marketplace for this content - exposure their user base, facilitate impulse buys, all sorts of nice things which include most of the reasons malls still exist.
Providing the content on their own website has a lot of advantages too - not the least that perhaps people might have a reason to go to nbc.com.
But the big difference is that they have more leverage to use against the middle-man on negotiations. "Look, it's not like you are our only choice. If we don't like the deal, we'll just take our content home and play by ourselves.".
This is less in line with "online video stores have no future", and more in line with "CEOs of online video stores may have to stop comparing the children of content-producer executives to ugly-bulldogs-after-a-car-accident".
I'm not sure, how does the cap on payment prevent exploitation of the poor?
It seems that historically that only results in them being paid less (according to the cap), and misled through misinformation about both the risks and the compensation.
Wish I had mod points this time: you raise what I think is a most important point.
The same thing applies to most other forms of written material: text normally has a different rythm, and often requires a different focus for good reason - most great works of literature would range from annoying to soporific if parsed as spoken language, but they're interesting and enjoyable in their form.
They're also far less enjoyable if read with the same level of concentration we give when listening to spoken language - which may be an argument for the brain being wired to multitask better when parsing information as sound... or for modern lack of listening skills.
Actually, exploiting the positive effects of reformatting text is not really that new.
We have been doing that with poetry and math for thousands of years, and many writers have played with similar formatting for experimental reasons. As someone pointed out elsewhere, this is what we do for code too.
I'm not aware of good research on the subject, however. So there may be real innovation on their part on developing a formal theory and engineering a method for consistent results.
I have no doubt that using this system would improve results in standarized tests, because short pieces of superficial information (and the style of modern magazine articles) seem very appropriate targets. But I think the impression of improvement may be misleading. I wonder what long term effects would it have on the literacy levels if we adopt this as a general solution blindly.
Although we know of bacteria adapted to very extreme conditions on the planet, I doubt these are the same bacteria adapted to human hosts on temperate environments. The variations in environment conditions is most likely what would kill them, not the extremity of those at any particular moment.
If it is on par with Flash now, that would be great.
But if it requires installation of the J2SE runtime, I don't know if we can call it 'on par'.
Flash has always been faster and more transparent to install on the spot, if you didn't have it.
I haven't been following Java as closely for a while, but last I checked, installing the latest runtime was a much bigger pain - in terms of both bandwidth and user experience.
This was one among many reasons people still targeted applets to 1.2 for an embarrasingly long time (I don't mean just targetting AWT, I mean collections and other core stuff).
I'd like to say I'm shocked and surprised at your tale, and hope that you're just too jaded by past experiences to give the game an honest chance.
But I have to admit, that Boromir always seemed a bit shifty to me.
I wouldn't be surprised if pig-related incidents happen again on LOTR online.
Yeah, it does seem a bit overkill.
If you're organization is so dynamic that your org. chart NEEDs to be generated at runtime by a script on your web server, then maybe writing perl scripts to auto-generate org charts shouldn't be your highest priority.
You're suggesting that a for-profit business refuses to serve new paying customers... because they're 'n00bs'?
What is this, the Soup Nazi school of open source business?
Is Civ4 open source?
Interesting. Care to share any hard data supporting that?
My understanding was that updates to the power management system in Vista where rather significant, and aimed specifically at reducing the power consumption of modern hardware. There was an old post about it on the vista team blog, with the details and relevant links (whitepaper, etc): http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/ar
Are you aware of any bugs, or any benchmarks that indicate the contrary?
I've heard/read about people claiming that the power-management changes confusing and/or overhyped, but I don't think I've read of any supported claims that Vista consumes more electricity than XP on the same hardware so far.
It would be a shame if after what, 4 or 5 years? of being a strong competitor, AMD loses focus on what is relevant in the market and just keeps making faster, more power-hungry, CPUs.
The last thing we need is for Intel to have no real competitors. Innovation would slow and prices would hike up.