AMD has been suffering recently because they are focusing their efforts on Opteron, and meanwhile Athlon isn't getting any younger. This is a temporary setback; if Opteron is any good then AMD will be performance competitive again, allowing them to sell at higher price points and get a better margin.
AMD was in the same funk back when Intel released the Pentium II and AMD was still working on Athlon. Once AMD got Athlon out the door they started doing a lot better.
This is the kind of approach that many companies (especially Microsoft) use that makes life difficult for others. Speed at the cost of correctness sounds good in the short term but always ends up biting you in the ass later. Efficient yet incorrect code is hard to maintain because it usually only makes sense to the original author. It breaks more easily than correct code since it is less tolerant to variations in the input. And eventually the performance delta is erased by hacks added in later revisions to get around problems caused by the original incorrect behavior.
The US doesn't even come close to being self sufficient in oil, so I doubt we are involved in the Middle East just for our allies.
From what I've read and seen in the world press most of the world wants the US to mind their own business.
And finally the real issue is that the US has made the rest of the world their business. The American economy would collapse if we stopped importing raw materials and exporting trade goods. Isolationism is an anachronism in this era of cheap shipping and cheaper foreign labor. So the US will continue to involve itself around the world not because the world sees the US as their knight in shining armor but because Coca-Cola is having labor problems or Chevron might have to pay an extra pennie per barrel of oil.
But thanks for flashback to 1950. Sometimes it is important to remember where we came from if we want to move ahead.
1. A CEO does not respect the environment if it stands in the way of profit. You don't see McDonalds campaigning to save the Amazon rainforest since it is being destroyed by Brazilian ranchers providing them with cheap beef.
2. A CEO demands military intervention if international interests are threatened. Nothing scares a multinational corporation more than a socialist uprising that limits their supply of cheap labor and/or raw materials. Or defaults on large loans.
Not too many tree-huggers promote military interventionism or discourage enironmental protection.
How do you make a CPU go faster without jacking up the clock? You can create a new design, but that would be a lot more expensive than jacking up the clock. It takes years to develop a new CPU design and IPC increases are usually minimal. Most new CPUs seem to be designed to run at higher frequencies to achieve better performance. The P4 actually has a lower IPC than the P3 but can operate at much higher frequencies.
Many companies are planning to use parallelism to improve performance. IBM has a CPU with two logical cores, and Intel will introduce CPUs with two virtual processors in the very near future. But parallelism is not likely to get you a doubling of performance, especially on a desktop machine that is often running only one intensive process at a time.
Killing and violence have been commonplace throughout history. Sex has been pretty popular too, judging from the six billion people on our planet today. Every society condemns violence. Yet many cultures that depend on sex to propagate their values treat sex as a shameful act. Who the hell pulled that manuever?
I doubt that historically all cultures have been so prudish. What kind of organization could propagate such a ridiculous idea to so many people? Hmmm...
I don't have any formal training in marketing besides having watched maybe 10000 hours of TV:) In many categories the market leader does not mention the competition. For instance, you don't see commercials where MacDonalds even mentions Burger King or their other competitors. Nike and Budweiser do the same thing. Up until now Microsoft has only compared their newest OS to previous versions of Windows.
If I was an Apple user I would be encouraged by this bit of marketing. It implies that Microsoft is concerned about their image compared with Apple and is willing to violate this empirical rule.
I doubt IBM would design a memory controller that uses a proprietary memory interface. This would raise their memory costs enormously without providing much in return.
I would guess that IBM would build a multichannel switched memory interface to DDR SDRAM. The controller would handle say four simultaneous requests for 64-bit memory values. This is what Nvidia does in their GPUs, and it seems to work for them. I believe the Sparc chip also has a similar on-chip memory controller.
Microsoft will probably offer the same convenience as the rest of the market because otherwise no one will use their software. Even a member of the "general public" is going to figure out that video files that cannot be moved are useless, and there are more and more ways to encode video files from video streams every day.
In fact Microsoft may run into trouble sooner rather than later in the living room PC market. A living room PC must use a custom form factor and run an extremely simple interface. These are things that Microsoft has no track record for, which opens the door for other players. Especially if those players can provide a lower-cost solution.
The secret is that Bill Gates is a precog and the actual Windows code base has been frozen for the last 20 years. The entire OS runs in 640K and will continue to operate on Intel hardware until they go belly up in 2069 when the transistor density of their final design combined with the intense heat it generates spontaneously punches through time/space to form a black hole.
Each new release is the last version with an exponentially increasing "fudge factor", a data file of randomized pRon collected by a web spider. This makes it look like they are actually doing work in Redmond instead of playing CounterStrike 24/7.
All Windows development ("cat Windows2000 pRon.dat > WindowsXP") occurs on a single IBM XT running Minix.
For 20+ years Microsoft didn't take any flak for security because their market was shmoes running spreadsheets and games. It's a flippant question because it only takes a modicum of thought to realize that no one was complaining about Microsoft security until the internet became easy and affordable.
A valid question might be "Why didn't Microsoft build security into their first generation network protocols and products?"
If SUVs didn't look cool with high bumpers then stupid Americans would stop buying them, resulting in massive losses by GM and Ford that would plunge the US into a major depression.
FYI I am an American and I resent the massive waste of resources that SUVs represent.
It is unfortunate that as it stands it makes sense for Microsoft to charge extra to be accountable for their product. I am sure there are other examples of this, but the vast majority of software developers don't take any responsibility for their product at all.
This may actually be an opportunity to commercialize OSS. If a company is willing to pay Microsoft to compensate them for monetary loss caused by Windows then might that same company want to pay less for the same assurance for an insured distro of linux? Insurance for linux should cost less since it is inherently more stable.
I guess this is just a sign that the software market is finally maturing to some extent. In a mature market, like automobiles, everyone guarantees their product and the cost is included in the price of the vehicle.
GSM is ubiquitous in Europe because it was mandated by the government. I don't think anyone is going to argue that it isn't convenient to be able to use one phone all over Europe.
The point of this article is NOT that GSM sucks now; rather that GSM has a broken upgrade path. This doesn't necessarily mean that GSM is going away. Europeans will continue to use GSM for as long as it is economically feasible for operators to maintain the network.
European operators have a few choices for the future:
1. Hope that wCDMA gets fixed before they go bankrupt from servicing their bandwidth debt without 3G income 2. Switch their next generation network choice to CDMA2000 and gain compatibility with American/Korean/Japanese networks 3. Get their bandwidth auction money back and give up on 3G.
It usually takes a while to go from "no working implementation" to "successful rollout", so Option 1 seems overly optimistic. It seems likely that dual-mode GSM/wCDMA phones would be bulky considering the difference in the networks.
Option 3 will work fine until Europeans grow dissatisfied with lagging the rest of the world with their 2G network. Having folks in other countries diss your phone technology kinda sucks:)
Option 2 results in a single worldwide 3G network, countered by the fact that GSM operators (and host countries) have to admit that it is OK to license and use US technology.
Who cares if a phone can be used with another provider? It usually ends up costing hundreds more to avoid a 2 year contract. Anyone who is willing to buy their own phone and pay month-to-month is certainly rich enough to buy another phone when they switch.
For the average American cell phone user by the time your contract is up your phone is hopelessly out of date. I will certainly buy a new phone when I change plans just because I can.
Get an iRMan input device and a universal remote. It is pretty easy to make WinAmp work with this remote solution. I still haven't spent the time getting my remote to work with ATI's multimedia center, which is a bit trickier.
Most of the great titles for each console are exclusive, as another post here points out.
I paid $200 for my Genesis and I (or, rather, my parents:) paid $50 for several premium NES titles. You can buy a GameCube for less than this, and most premium game titles are still $50, and have been for several years. $50 / up to 50 hours of gameplay = a pretty good deal in entertainment.
Your next point is unclear, but I suspect that poor people can more easily afford a cutting edge $200 console than a super crappy $500 computer.
Every computer game maker cares what Dell ships because that is the hardware platform for a whole lot of potential computer gamers.
There are many costs associated with console game development, and this is partly offset by the fact that current consoles have millions of deployed units which means a really popular game can easily sell millions of units. While it is possible to make a computer game cheaply it seems like most new PC games are published by huge corporations and end up costing millions.
You forgot to mention the three things that make computer gaming worthwhile: the keyboard, mouse and high resolution monitor.
Most of the best PC games rely on the flexibility of the mouse and keyboard as game controllers. First person shooters and real time strategy games just don't feel right without these controllers.
The high resolution monitor yields sharper images and makes small text readable. This is why you don't see too many successful real time strategy games or flight simulators on consoles.
Integrated video solutions as a general class are not very good for running the newest games. Why do reviewers insist on focusing on 3d benchmarks? I read a bunch of reviews for the various ATI All-In-Wonder cards and most of them copy and paste the marketing boilerplate for unique video capture features, and then focus on game benchmarks. Who the hell is going to buy an All-In-Wonder just to play games?
An AIW costs at least $100 more than the equivalent Radeon card without the video features. It doesn't make sense to buy this card unless you are going to record video, and I finally found a couple of reviews written by people who realized this fact.
I don't think anyone is going to use integrated video primarily to play games. And I doubt any of these chipsets can't handle email and browser usage at low resolutions. So why can't someone test the things that might matter? Things like typical workstation resolutions (1280x1024, 1600x1200), video, and the TV out if there is one? These are all glaring questions for the tested chipsets.
I appreciate free hardware reviews but sometimes I wish the typical review sites weren't so focused on one aspect of computing and spent a little time trying to figure out who their audience is.
Considering there appear to be more Windows boxes in the world I would suspect that there are more developers on the Windows platform than any other single platform. That said, I don't think it is fair to castigate a school for choosing Windows over any other proprietary platform.
My school used a lot of donated hardware/software, and generally the only companies that can afford to donate labs worth of hardware/software are doing so to push their own proprietary platform. So we ended up doing our development on Sun, DEC and HP workstations.
IBM is doing fine in the market, and so is Sun (who grew their Unix market share last quarter). This makes any massive migration from Sun to Big Blue unlikely.
I'm sure that a brand new $2500 Dell Workstation can do many things faster than a 1996 era $25,000 SGI workstation. I highly doubt you have even seen a brand new $25,000 SGI workstation or have any idea what it can do.
I think the primary difference between a Cult and a Church is a single charismatic leader. A Cult relies on this leader to hold the flock together. A Cult graduates to a Church when the leader dies and the flock keep their faith.
By this logic the CoS is really a Church. Every Church starts as a Cult, so the only Churches that get misidentified as Cults are the relatively new ones (like Scientology).
If anyone thinks Scientology is too ridiculous to be a Church then remember that Buddha saw demons, the Torah requires five prayer sessions a day and the Bible states that the earth is less than 5000 years old. It wouldn't be faith if it made sense:)
Slashdot Mirror
AMD has been suffering recently because they are focusing their efforts on Opteron, and meanwhile Athlon isn't getting any younger. This is a temporary setback; if Opteron is any good then AMD will be performance competitive again, allowing them to sell at higher price points and get a better margin.
AMD was in the same funk back when Intel released the Pentium II and AMD was still working on Athlon. Once AMD got Athlon out the door they started doing a lot better.
This is the kind of approach that many companies (especially Microsoft) use that makes life difficult for others. Speed at the cost of correctness sounds good in the short term but always ends up biting you in the ass later. Efficient yet incorrect code is hard to maintain because it usually only makes sense to the original author. It breaks more easily than correct code since it is less tolerant to variations in the input. And eventually the performance delta is erased by hacks added in later revisions to get around problems caused by the original incorrect behavior.
The US doesn't even come close to being self sufficient in oil, so I doubt we are involved in the Middle East just for our allies.
From what I've read and seen in the world press most of the world wants the US to mind their own business.
And finally the real issue is that the US has made the rest of the world their business. The American economy would collapse if we stopped importing raw materials and exporting trade goods. Isolationism is an anachronism in this era of cheap shipping and cheaper foreign labor. So the US will continue to involve itself around the world not because the world sees the US as their knight in shining armor but because Coca-Cola is having labor problems or Chevron might have to pay an extra pennie per barrel of oil.
But thanks for flashback to 1950. Sometimes it is important to remember where we came from if we want to move ahead.
1. A CEO does not respect the environment if it stands in the way of profit. You don't see McDonalds campaigning to save the Amazon rainforest since it is being destroyed by Brazilian ranchers providing them with cheap beef.
2. A CEO demands military intervention if international interests are threatened. Nothing scares a multinational corporation more than a socialist uprising that limits their supply of cheap labor and/or raw materials. Or defaults on large loans.
Not too many tree-huggers promote military interventionism or discourage enironmental protection.
Why would a word get longer? I will always pick the spelling with fewer letters.
How do you make a CPU go faster without jacking up the clock? You can create a new design, but that would be a lot more expensive than jacking up the clock. It takes years to develop a new CPU design and IPC increases are usually minimal. Most new CPUs seem to be designed to run at higher frequencies to achieve better performance. The P4 actually has a lower IPC than the P3 but can operate at much higher frequencies.
Many companies are planning to use parallelism to improve performance. IBM has a CPU with two logical cores, and Intel will introduce CPUs with two virtual processors in the very near future. But parallelism is not likely to get you a doubling of performance, especially on a desktop machine that is often running only one intensive process at a time.
Killing and violence have been commonplace throughout history. Sex has been pretty popular too, judging from the six billion people on our planet today. Every society condemns violence. Yet many cultures that depend on sex to propagate their values treat sex as a shameful act. Who the hell pulled that manuever?
I doubt that historically all cultures have been so prudish. What kind of organization could propagate such a ridiculous idea to so many people? Hmmm...
I don't have any formal training in marketing besides having watched maybe 10000 hours of TV :) In many categories the market leader does not mention the competition. For instance, you don't see commercials where MacDonalds even mentions Burger King or their other competitors. Nike and Budweiser do the same thing. Up until now Microsoft has only compared their newest OS to previous versions of Windows.
If I was an Apple user I would be encouraged by this bit of marketing. It implies that Microsoft is concerned about their image compared with Apple and is willing to violate this empirical rule.
I doubt IBM would design a memory controller that uses a proprietary memory interface. This would raise their memory costs enormously without providing much in return.
I would guess that IBM would build a multichannel switched memory interface to DDR SDRAM. The controller would handle say four simultaneous requests for 64-bit memory values. This is what Nvidia does in their GPUs, and it seems to work for them. I believe the Sparc chip also has a similar on-chip memory controller.
Microsoft will probably offer the same convenience as the rest of the market because otherwise no one will use their software. Even a member of the "general public" is going to figure out that video files that cannot be moved are useless, and there are more and more ways to encode video files from video streams every day.
In fact Microsoft may run into trouble sooner rather than later in the living room PC market. A living room PC must use a custom form factor and run an extremely simple interface. These are things that Microsoft has no track record for, which opens the door for other players. Especially if those players can provide a lower-cost solution.
The secret is that Bill Gates is a precog and the actual Windows code base has been frozen for the last 20 years. The entire OS runs in 640K and will continue to operate on Intel hardware until they go belly up in 2069 when the transistor density of their final design combined with the intense heat it generates spontaneously punches through time/space to form a black hole.
Each new release is the last version with an exponentially increasing "fudge factor", a data file of randomized pRon collected by a web spider. This makes it look like they are actually doing work in Redmond instead of playing CounterStrike 24/7.
All Windows development ("cat Windows2000 pRon.dat > WindowsXP") occurs on a single IBM XT running Minix.
For 20+ years Microsoft didn't take any flak for security because their market was shmoes running spreadsheets and games. It's a flippant question because it only takes a modicum of thought to realize that no one was complaining about Microsoft security until the internet became easy and affordable.
A valid question might be "Why didn't Microsoft build security into their first generation network protocols and products?"
I think the gnomes have the best idea:
1. Collect Underwear
2. ?
3. PROFIT!
If SUVs didn't look cool with high bumpers then stupid Americans would stop buying them, resulting in massive losses by GM and Ford that would plunge the US into a major depression.
FYI I am an American and I resent the massive waste of resources that SUVs represent.
It is unfortunate that as it stands it makes sense for Microsoft to charge extra to be accountable for their product. I am sure there are other examples of this, but the vast majority of software developers don't take any responsibility for their product at all.
This may actually be an opportunity to commercialize OSS. If a company is willing to pay Microsoft to compensate them for monetary loss caused by Windows then might that same company want to pay less for the same assurance for an insured distro of linux? Insurance for linux should cost less since it is inherently more stable.
I guess this is just a sign that the software market is finally maturing to some extent. In a mature market, like automobiles, everyone guarantees their product and the cost is included in the price of the vehicle.
GSM is ubiquitous in Europe because it was mandated by the government. I don't think anyone is going to argue that it isn't convenient to be able to use one phone all over Europe.
:)
The point of this article is NOT that GSM sucks now; rather that GSM has a broken upgrade path. This doesn't necessarily mean that GSM is going away. Europeans will continue to use GSM for as long as it is economically feasible for operators to maintain the network.
European operators have a few choices for the future:
1. Hope that wCDMA gets fixed before they go bankrupt from servicing their bandwidth debt without 3G income
2. Switch their next generation network choice to CDMA2000 and gain compatibility with American/Korean/Japanese networks
3. Get their bandwidth auction money back and give up on 3G.
It usually takes a while to go from "no working implementation" to "successful rollout", so Option 1 seems overly optimistic. It seems likely that dual-mode GSM/wCDMA phones would be bulky considering the difference in the networks.
Option 3 will work fine until Europeans grow dissatisfied with lagging the rest of the world with their 2G network. Having folks in other countries diss your phone technology kinda sucks
Option 2 results in a single worldwide 3G network, countered by the fact that GSM operators (and host countries) have to admit that it is OK to license and use US technology.
How who looks like the stubborn nationalists?
Who cares if a phone can be used with another provider? It usually ends up costing hundreds more to avoid a 2 year contract. Anyone who is willing to buy their own phone and pay month-to-month is certainly rich enough to buy another phone when they switch.
For the average American cell phone user by the time your contract is up your phone is hopelessly out of date. I will certainly buy a new phone when I change plans just because I can.
Get an iRMan input device and a universal remote. It is pretty easy to make WinAmp work with this remote solution. I still haven't spent the time getting my remote to work with ATI's multimedia center, which is a bit trickier.
Most of the great titles for each console are exclusive, as another post here points out.
:) paid $50 for several premium NES titles. You can buy a GameCube for less than this, and most premium game titles are still $50, and have been for several years. $50 / up to 50 hours of gameplay = a pretty good deal in entertainment.
I paid $200 for my Genesis and I (or, rather, my parents
Your next point is unclear, but I suspect that poor people can more easily afford a cutting edge $200 console than a super crappy $500 computer.
Every computer game maker cares what Dell ships because that is the hardware platform for a whole lot of potential computer gamers.
There are many costs associated with console game development, and this is partly offset by the fact that current consoles have millions of deployed units which means a really popular game can easily sell millions of units. While it is possible to make a computer game cheaply it seems like most new PC games are published by huge corporations and end up costing millions.
You forgot to mention the three things that make computer gaming worthwhile: the keyboard, mouse and high resolution monitor.
Most of the best PC games rely on the flexibility of the mouse and keyboard as game controllers. First person shooters and real time strategy games just don't feel right without these controllers.
The high resolution monitor yields sharper images and makes small text readable. This is why you don't see too many successful real time strategy games or flight simulators on consoles.
Integrated video solutions as a general class are not very good for running the newest games. Why do reviewers insist on focusing on 3d benchmarks? I read a bunch of reviews for the various ATI All-In-Wonder cards and most of them copy and paste the marketing boilerplate for unique video capture features, and then focus on game benchmarks. Who the hell is going to buy an All-In-Wonder just to play games?
An AIW costs at least $100 more than the equivalent Radeon card without the video features. It doesn't make sense to buy this card unless you are going to record video, and I finally found a couple of reviews written by people who realized this fact.
I don't think anyone is going to use integrated video primarily to play games. And I doubt any of these chipsets can't handle email and browser usage at low resolutions. So why can't someone test the things that might matter? Things like typical workstation resolutions (1280x1024, 1600x1200), video, and the TV out if there is one? These are all glaring questions for the tested chipsets.
I appreciate free hardware reviews but sometimes I wish the typical review sites weren't so focused on one aspect of computing and spent a little time trying to figure out who their audience is.
The jar format is exactly equivalent to zip, which seems to work pretty well.
Considering there appear to be more Windows boxes in the world I would suspect that there are more developers on the Windows platform than any other single platform. That said, I don't think it is fair to castigate a school for choosing Windows over any other proprietary platform.
My school used a lot of donated hardware/software, and generally the only companies that can afford to donate labs worth of hardware/software are doing so to push their own proprietary platform. So we ended up doing our development on Sun, DEC and HP workstations.
IBM is doing fine in the market, and so is Sun (who grew their Unix market share last quarter). This makes any massive migration from Sun to Big Blue unlikely.
I'm sure that a brand new $2500 Dell Workstation can do many things faster than a 1996 era $25,000 SGI workstation. I highly doubt you have even seen a brand new $25,000 SGI workstation or have any idea what it can do.
The parallax blocker is a mechanical filter fitted by the user to the display. It most definitely is switchable.
RTFWP
I think the primary difference between a Cult and a Church is a single charismatic leader. A Cult relies on this leader to hold the flock together. A Cult graduates to a Church when the leader dies and the flock keep their faith.
:)
By this logic the CoS is really a Church. Every Church starts as a Cult, so the only Churches that get misidentified as Cults are the relatively new ones (like Scientology).
If anyone thinks Scientology is too ridiculous to be a Church then remember that Buddha saw demons, the Torah requires five prayer sessions a day and the Bible states that the earth is less than 5000 years old. It wouldn't be faith if it made sense