and zion is the "quarantine" folder of Norton Antivirus 2350 Enterprise Edition
I always knew Peter Nortion was satan.
Re:seen the price of VS.NET?
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 1
You sure it comes with the compiler for C++ and VB.NET? I was under the impression it only came with the C# command line compiler.
If it does come with the others, what's the filename of the command line compiler for VB.NET? I know C# is csc.exe, and I believe C++ is cl.exe (though the managed code compiler is likely named something else).
Re:Could it be... The Price?
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 1
Part of the arguement for the higher price is, get this, that Borland wasn't being taken seriously by corporations because the lower price seemed to indicate that their tools were meant for hobbyists and not serious enterprise development.
Yes, you can stop laughing, it's not funny anymore.
Re:seen the price of VS.NET?
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 1
You seem to know something, but you refer to Visual C#.NET, Visual C++.NET, Visual Basic.NET and Visual J#.NET as four languages. Only one of these actually allows you to use the CRL to its full capacity, and that's C#.
Sure, if all you're targetting is.NET and the CLR, C# is the only language that matters-- but back to the price debate, if all you want is C#, go buy Visual C#.NET Standard for $99 at your local Best Buy or what have you. However, if you want to do native x86 Win32 development, Visual C++.NET can still compile native executables that run on their own without the.NET Framework.
Then there's Visual Basic.NET, which I know has problems, but provides a means for people who ONLY know VB to move forward-- not the perfect language to leverage.NET, but not the worst either as I understand it. That falls to Visual J#, another token inclusion, but depending on your tasks, might prove useful.
With Visual Studio.NET Professional you get a full toolbox, with Borland you get a hammer or a saw or a screwdriver-- you don't get the full toolbox. Doing Delphi development? Great, great, buy Delphi for.NET! Oh, need to work with some C# code for some reason. Good, good, here, buy Borland C# Builder! Ahhh, finally hit upon some C++ code that needs to be maintained? Nice, nice, here, buy Borland CBuilderX! Java? A copy of JBuilder, also a seperate purchase, and you're all set!
I'm going to assume, probably wrongly, that each of those for a new user is $999. I know Delphi is $999, and I'm pretty sure the others are as well. Anyways, that's $4000 or so to get four tools. Pay Microsoft $1000 and you get basically the same four tools-- sure, there's differences, but generally you're set. No Linux support of course, and doing GUI work in native C++ (not managed code) can be a PITA, but hey, you're $3000 richer, and if you wanna do GUI, bite the bullet and use C#, VB.NET or managed C++ (which I believe supports using VS's form designer).
Re:seen the price of VS.NET?
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 4, Informative
Isn't that about the price of many of the more popular IDEs? VS.NET Professional sticker price is also $999 ( check amazon for instance ).
Apple, meet Orange.
You're comparing a Win32 development tool to a Linux development tool. Now I'll pretend you know this, and debate it anyways-- with Visual Studio.NET Professional you don't just get one language, you get access to four. You get Visual C#.NET, Visual C++.NET, Visual Basic.NET and Visual J#.NET. With Kylix all you get is Delphi (Pascal) and C++ (which I'm not entirely sure, but I think the backend uses gcc-- I may be wrong on this point though).. two languages vs. four languages in VS.
Of course the odd thing is, Kylix has an "open edition" that's free as in beer for GPL work, IIRC. It doesn't make sense that Linux developers wanting to try it out wouldn't try the OE version then pay for the retail version if they wanted to do commercial apps down the road.
Borland has one of the best IDEs I've used, definately the best Java IDE I've used as a *free* download. I have never needed to use anything that's not available in the JBuilder Personal edition.
Agreed, their IDE's have always been a winner with me, but their marketing skills leave loads to be desired. Just check out some of the prices at shop.borland.com vs. the prices list at shop.microsoft.com for examples of the travesty going on at Borland today. *shakes head*
Yeah, that might work with the framework installed, but something that actually put out a standard Win32 binary with x86 instructions, etc. would be truly nice. I like C# as a language, not as a vehicle for Bill Gates to (try to) kill off Java.
Well the idea is that whatever solution is deemed best for beginners that it be included with the OS and not be something that has to be sought for. This would make it a more ubiquitous learning language (be it VB or C#). And really, just to get your feet wet, being able to compile console programs (which I don't think VB can) might make C# the better learning language for Windows users.
For someone who has absolutely no clue what a programming language is, or how applications are developed, seeking out the.NET Framework SDK would probably be beyond their reach as well. =)
But in general I agree with you. Maybe a stripped down Visual Studio that only had C# and had no visual designer for GUI apps, but *did* include the language reference as well as the.NET Framework SDK reference (so the would-be learning developer could more easily find info on basic operations; opening a file, reading some data, etc). The IDE would be nice simply for the syntax highlighting and the "IntelliSense" (code completion). Seeing as MS gives VC# Standard away for $99, it doesn't seem unreasonable for a non-commercial non-visual GUI designer IDE to be included in the box for Windows XP or Longhorn.
Wow dude. That document is going to confuse the fuck out of all those Visual Basic programmers after Microsoft deprecates their language.
Seriously, the day Microsoft kills VB will be the happiest day of my life. VB should be a learning language and nothing more-- it absolutely should never ever, not even if you think it'll be easier to get shipped, be used in production code.
Just to prove that I'm not being snotty or anything-- I learned how to program by using QuickBasic 4.5 and Visual Basic for DOS 1.0-- shortly after getting through that I moved to Turbo Pascal, learned some C/C++, and braved my way into assembly (which has been a mixed bag; I can write faster code generally than a compiler can come up with, but it's not a valued skill which goes to show the attitude of most software houses these days).
In my case QB/VB had it's place-- a learning experience. IMHO, Microsoft should come up with a scaled back/simple Visual Basic.NET and include it with Windows (ala QBASIC which was included with Windows '9x/DOS) so people who are stuck with Windows can at least learn how to program if the mood strikes them. But otherwise, VB is worthless, a nice robust language like C# is where developers should be moving. My only gripe with C# is the lack of a native code compiler (rather than something that emits.NET bytecode).
Yeah, product activation ranks right up there with gun control laws in my mind. The only people who have the guns after you implement and enforce gun control laws are the criminals.
In this case, as you say, the only people who don't have to activate are the very people the activation is supposed to be suppressing.
Wow, how weird, I could have sworn I saw them at Costco for $30-40 a season. Either way, it's a rip off even if they're not the only ones doing it. The episodes were paid for long ago with advertising fees and syndication fees. All they've done here is pay some firm to clean up the video for DVD, make some menus, and thrown together a few documentaries (which may have already existed in other regions), paid someone to make a box design and pushed the whole thing out to a pressing facility to have the discs made for pennies, if that, per disc.
At least with a feature length movie I'm getting some value. This is just a rip off through and through.
Seems to include that Borg-ship shaped cube and a wall clock. Spiffy!
How much the box set will retail for
The linked-to site lists it as 449.99 pound RRP (recommended retail price? - as opposed to 'suggested retail price' here in the US?), which just off the top of my head, is a whole heckuva lot of money.
I sure wish Paramount would stop abusing Star Trek fans with this overpriced shit, it's amazing how you can buy whole seasons of The X-Files for like $20-30 USD a season IIRC, but for Star Trek TNG? Oh, our price is $100 USD per season (or more!). So ridiculous.
Quicktime isn't a codec, it's an API which encompasses a number of codecs. It can't be 'released for DirectX' because it's a coding framework, not a video file format.
Sure it is, it just has multiple encoding methods, meaning you'd need multiple CODEC's to handle all the variations of QuickTime Apple has, or you'd need one CODEC that handled them all. In any event, Microsoft used to ship a QuickTime CODEC for Windows Media Player that would allow you to view MOV's in WMP. Ever since QuickTime 4 I think it's stopped supporting that CODEC. It seems to me it should be up to Apple to update or release new CODEC's.
FWIW, I hate QuickTime's player on Windows, it's constantly refreshing background windows on my system (as if it's sending WM_PAINT messages to random windows in the background) and whenever something paints in the background it lags the video being played. I am, right now, using QuickTime Pro's export capability to export the trailer to an AVI so I can re-encode it to something else (something better).
Thanks for the irrelevant post. I never said it was going to make a big splash in the server market. The desktop market has NO 64-bit CPU's, and the Itanium platform (IA-64) is maturing slowly but surely, and has much more testing and development under it's belt than x86-64 has. If Intel felt threatened by x86-64, IA-64 would be their best bet, IMNSHO.
That is, die space that's not filled with cache. The enormous amount of cache on the chip is one of the main reasons for a lot of the Itanium's performance wins.
Uh, yeah... IIRC, Itanium's have larger than normal L1 and L2 caches, this is true, but they also have huge L3 caches which aren't part of the die. I was referring to die space used for more execution units to execute more code in parallel.
As are all modern processors.
I'm sorry, but you're incorrect.
IA-32 based CPU's do not execute code in parallel except for very specific instructions that don't cause contention on resources (for example, if you have an instruction stream that utilizes the same register for multiple different calculations, you will be very hard pressed to get that code to execute in parallel).
IA-64 has provisions to truely execute code in parallel, without any special instruction sequencing or instruction selection tricks to look out for. It simply does it if you tell it to.
The Itanium technique, from what I understand, requires the compiler to do just about everything.
Yep, and this makes the most sense. Why figure all this stuff out at run-time with look-ahead buffers and other clumsy technologies? All of this can be determined much more accurately at compile time, because the source code available to the compiler is much more likely to have it's own hints as to what the author is trying to do than a bunch of opcodes haphazardly emitted to an executable.
Yes it puts the onus on compiler writers to do some work in making their code generator emit quality code (looking for opportunities to take advantage of parallel processor, and so on), but that's the way technology works-- you come up with something better, but it requires effort to make it work properly. IA-64 is far superior to IA-32, and has much more opportunity for performance code generation.
From there, the execution is relatively simple -- the processor doesn't have to worry about finding the parallelism, the compiler's figured it all out already!
Right, so I see we agree that this is a major feature of IA-64, it's ability to concentrate on code execution rather than prediction of code paths and such. Thanks for that.
But the thing is, there's a lot you can't know about how most programs are going to behave until run-time. Much of the available parallelism *has* to be determined by the processor itself.
I don't think you understand code generation, that, or you're being naive. The compiler is in the best position to determine what code can execute in parallel, and how best to order the instructions to gain maximum speed from the CPU in executing that code. The CPU's task is to cache the most commonly used code, basically doing the duties a profiler would have done back in ye olde DOS days. Determine the most commonly executed code paths and keep them in the cache as long as possible
The only difference between a profiler in the old days and this cache technique is that the profiler allowed the developer to see what code was consuming the most CPU cycles. I suppose then with a profiler for IA-64 PLUS the cacheing of code, you could potentially gain some great speedups in your usual IA-32 code if you compiled it for IA-64.
IMNSHO, IA-64 is the future of Intel desktop CPU's, and the instruction set that they'll ultimately move forward with. It scales well, it puts the work that should be done by the compiler with the compiler, and leaves the CPU with as little to do as possible besides fetching instructions, decoding them, and executing as many of them in parallel as possible. That's all a CPU should do.
Yeah, and that's your only valid point. And I think that's all about to change since AMD appears to be trying to take on Intel in this arena. Now as to whether Prescott (with purported 64-bit extensions) or Itanium comes out as the desktop technology Intel ultimately pushes is anyones guess, but my point still stands-- Intel has 64-bit technology already out there, and it's quite likely that if Prescott's 64-bit extensions are non-existant, that they'll push Itanium's prices down to compete on the desktop.
The thing is, Microsoft has already ported Windows to IA-64, already has compiler technology that targets IA-64 (there's a command line Visual C++ compiler included with the Windows Server 2003 DDK), and wouldn't take much effort to re-target all their bread and butter products (Office, SQL Server, etc) to IA-64 to finish the support off.
The fact that Itanium is uber-expensive now is almost a non-issue-- the reason it's expensive is because Intel KNOWS they can charge that much because they're selling/marketing it as a "server" or "enterprise" solution, not a desktop solution. Rest assured, if it came to desktops, the price would fall and we'd see an "Itanium Xeon" with absurd pricing for the server/enterprise markets to continue feeding Intel's cash cow.
You did say desktop, right? Then, you're right, as near as I can determine: Itanium isn't a latecomer; it's a no-show
It's out there and available if you want it. Microsoft already offers up a version of Windows that will run on an IA-64 based CPU. SDK's and DDK's already are available that target IA-64. The software and hardware is here today.
Specifically, not one that's from an actual brick and mortar greeting card maker. 9 times out of 10, you'll be sure to be not only adding YOURSELF (the sender) as a future spam victim, but whoever you entered as a recipient for the e-greeting card.
I concede it was an awful anology. This is what happens when one posts on little sleep.;) But the point is, any indication that Intel is conceding that 64-bit extensions to IA-32 at the way to go (rather than IA-64, e.g. - Itanium) would be fuel for AMD to use to sell their x86-64 based CPU's. "Look here, Intel is saying 64-bit exntensions are the way to go, and we've got them, now!" Intel won't have Prescott out the door for a little while longer, giving AMD an edge since x86-64 is here right now practically.
The design of the IA-64 architecture is such that it scales well with larger and larger die space. It's designed to be able to execute code in parallel, in fact, that's the cornerstone of the way it encodes instructions (in bundles, with multiple bundles possible to be executed at once if the CPU supports it). IIRC the original Itanium and Itanium 2 don't really exploit this yet, but rest assured, it's something that will make the IA-64 architecture outperform current and future revs of other 64-bit CPU's.
Not to mention the other architectural advances-- which aren't really ingenious, beyond the fact that more CPU registers (for example) saves memory bandwidth, and so on. A lot of the features IA-64 boasts are just logical extensions to IA-32, but some of it is particularly cool since it's very forward looking (the instruction bundles) and will scale well.
Are you perhaps trying to say Intel marketing Prescott's 64 bit capability would make consumers not previously interested/aware of 64 bit computing interested/aware of it, and in doing so, provide fire for AMD sales of their already launched 64 bit offering? If that's the case, then I can see some logic there, but your intent was not very clear in that statement.
Heh, this is what I thought I was saying all along.;) Yes, this is what I meant-- Intel coming out and saying they have 64-bit extensions in Prescott would validate AMD's x86-64, essentially helping to drive sales of x86-64 based CPU's.
Itanium is a late-comer to the server 64-bit market. Itanium is NOT a late-comer to the 64-bit desktop 64-bit market. In the latter case, AMD is the late-comer.
Given the architectural advances inherent in the Itanium's design, I sincerely hope it wins out in the desktop arena when that battle is played out. With AMD releasing their x86-64 CPU's, I imagine this battle will become much more center stage, and maybe we'll see the Itanium (or a desktop variant) seeing some huge price drops sooner rather than later.
IIRC, Microsoft already has versions of Windows that will run on IA-64 hardware, so that just leaves the other killer apps mentioned before to target IA-64 natively to make it a more desirable platform.
Slashdot Mirror
Norton even...
I always knew Peter Nortion was satan.
You sure it comes with the compiler for C++ and VB.NET? I was under the impression it only came with the C# command line compiler.
If it does come with the others, what's the filename of the command line compiler for VB.NET? I know C# is csc.exe, and I believe C++ is cl.exe (though the managed code compiler is likely named something else).
Part of the arguement for the higher price is, get this, that Borland wasn't being taken seriously by corporations because the lower price seemed to indicate that their tools were meant for hobbyists and not serious enterprise development.
Yes, you can stop laughing, it's not funny anymore.
Sure, if all you're targetting is .NET and the CLR, C# is the only language that matters-- but back to the price debate, if all you want is C#, go buy Visual C# .NET Standard for $99 at your local Best Buy or what have you. However, if you want to do native x86 Win32 development, Visual C++ .NET can still compile native executables that run on their own without the .NET Framework.
Then there's Visual Basic .NET, which I know has problems, but provides a means for people who ONLY know VB to move forward-- not the perfect language to leverage .NET, but not the worst either as I understand it. That falls to Visual J#, another token inclusion, but depending on your tasks, might prove useful.
With Visual Studio .NET Professional you get a full toolbox, with Borland you get a hammer or a saw or a screwdriver-- you don't get the full toolbox. Doing Delphi development? Great, great, buy Delphi for .NET! Oh, need to work with some C# code for some reason. Good, good, here, buy Borland C# Builder! Ahhh, finally hit upon some C++ code that needs to be maintained? Nice, nice, here, buy Borland CBuilderX! Java? A copy of JBuilder, also a seperate purchase, and you're all set!
I'm going to assume, probably wrongly, that each of those for a new user is $999. I know Delphi is $999, and I'm pretty sure the others are as well. Anyways, that's $4000 or so to get four tools. Pay Microsoft $1000 and you get basically the same four tools-- sure, there's differences, but generally you're set. No Linux support of course, and doing GUI work in native C++ (not managed code) can be a PITA, but hey, you're $3000 richer, and if you wanna do GUI, bite the bullet and use C#, VB.NET or managed C++ (which I believe supports using VS's form designer).
Apple, meet Orange.
You're comparing a Win32 development tool to a Linux development tool. Now I'll pretend you know this, and debate it anyways-- with Visual Studio .NET Professional you don't just get one language, you get access to four. You get Visual C# .NET, Visual C++ .NET, Visual Basic .NET and Visual J# .NET. With Kylix all you get is Delphi (Pascal) and C++ (which I'm not entirely sure, but I think the backend uses gcc-- I may be wrong on this point though).. two languages vs. four languages in VS.
Of course the odd thing is, Kylix has an "open edition" that's free as in beer for GPL work, IIRC. It doesn't make sense that Linux developers wanting to try it out wouldn't try the OE version then pay for the retail version if they wanted to do commercial apps down the road.
Agreed, their IDE's have always been a winner with me, but their marketing skills leave loads to be desired. Just check out some of the prices at shop.borland.com vs. the prices list at shop.microsoft.com for examples of the travesty going on at Borland today. *shakes head*
Modding me down doesn't change the truth of what I said. Nice try.
Yeah, that might work with the framework installed, but something that actually put out a standard Win32 binary with x86 instructions, etc. would be truly nice. I like C# as a language, not as a vehicle for Bill Gates to (try to) kill off Java.
Bring on... the trolls! Thanks for that, I knew I'd get one to bite eventually.
Well the idea is that whatever solution is deemed best for beginners that it be included with the OS and not be something that has to be sought for. This would make it a more ubiquitous learning language (be it VB or C#). And really, just to get your feet wet, being able to compile console programs (which I don't think VB can) might make C# the better learning language for Windows users.
.NET Framework SDK would probably be beyond their reach as well. =)
.NET Framework SDK reference (so the would-be learning developer could more easily find info on basic operations; opening a file, reading some data, etc). The IDE would be nice simply for the syntax highlighting and the "IntelliSense" (code completion). Seeing as MS gives VC# Standard away for $99, it doesn't seem unreasonable for a non-commercial non-visual GUI designer IDE to be included in the box for Windows XP or Longhorn.
For someone who has absolutely no clue what a programming language is, or how applications are developed, seeking out the
But in general I agree with you. Maybe a stripped down Visual Studio that only had C# and had no visual designer for GUI apps, but *did* include the language reference as well as the
Just to prove that I'm not being snotty or anything-- I learned how to program by using QuickBasic 4.5 and Visual Basic for DOS 1.0-- shortly after getting through that I moved to Turbo Pascal, learned some C/C++, and braved my way into assembly (which has been a mixed bag; I can write faster code generally than a compiler can come up with, but it's not a valued skill which goes to show the attitude of most software houses these days).
In my case QB/VB had it's place-- a learning experience. IMHO, Microsoft should come up with a scaled back/simple Visual Basic
Yeah, product activation ranks right up there with gun control laws in my mind. The only people who have the guns after you implement and enforce gun control laws are the criminals.
In this case, as you say, the only people who don't have to activate are the very people the activation is supposed to be suppressing.
Wow, how weird, I could have sworn I saw them at Costco for $30-40 a season. Either way, it's a rip off even if they're not the only ones doing it. The episodes were paid for long ago with advertising fees and syndication fees. All they've done here is pay some firm to clean up the video for DVD, make some menus, and thrown together a few documentaries (which may have already existed in other regions), paid someone to make a box design and pushed the whole thing out to a pressing facility to have the discs made for pennies, if that, per disc.
At least with a feature length movie I'm getting some value. This is just a rip off through and through.
Seems to include that Borg-ship shaped cube and a wall clock. Spiffy!
The linked-to site lists it as 449.99 pound RRP (recommended retail price? - as opposed to 'suggested retail price' here in the US?), which just off the top of my head, is a whole heckuva lot of money.
I sure wish Paramount would stop abusing Star Trek fans with this overpriced shit, it's amazing how you can buy whole seasons of The X-Files for like $20-30 USD a season IIRC, but for Star Trek TNG? Oh, our price is $100 USD per season (or more!). So ridiculous.
Please don't feed the troll.
Sure it is, it just has multiple encoding methods, meaning you'd need multiple CODEC's to handle all the variations of QuickTime Apple has, or you'd need one CODEC that handled them all. In any event, Microsoft used to ship a QuickTime CODEC for Windows Media Player that would allow you to view MOV's in WMP. Ever since QuickTime 4 I think it's stopped supporting that CODEC. It seems to me it should be up to Apple to update or release new CODEC's.
FWIW, I hate QuickTime's player on Windows, it's constantly refreshing background windows on my system (as if it's sending WM_PAINT messages to random windows in the background) and whenever something paints in the background it lags the video being played. I am, right now, using QuickTime Pro's export capability to export the trailer to an AVI so I can re-encode it to something else (something better).
Thanks for the irrelevant post. I never said it was going to make a big splash in the server market. The desktop market has NO 64-bit CPU's, and the Itanium platform (IA-64) is maturing slowly but surely, and has much more testing and development under it's belt than x86-64 has. If Intel felt threatened by x86-64, IA-64 would be their best bet, IMNSHO.
I'm sorry, but you're incorrect.
IA-32 based CPU's do not execute code in parallel except for very specific instructions that don't cause contention on resources (for example, if you have an instruction stream that utilizes the same register for multiple different calculations, you will be very hard pressed to get that code to execute in parallel).
IA-64 has provisions to truely execute code in parallel, without any special instruction sequencing or instruction selection tricks to look out for. It simply does it if you tell it to.
Yep, and this makes the most sense. Why figure all this stuff out at run-time with look-ahead buffers and other clumsy technologies? All of this can be determined much more accurately at compile time, because the source code available to the compiler is much more likely to have it's own hints as to what the author is trying to do than a bunch of opcodes haphazardly emitted to an executable.
Yes it puts the onus on compiler writers to do some work in making their code generator emit quality code (looking for opportunities to take advantage of parallel processor, and so on), but that's the way technology works-- you come up with something better, but it requires effort to make it work properly. IA-64 is far superior to IA-32, and has much more opportunity for performance code generation.
Right, so I see we agree that this is a major feature of IA-64, it's ability to concentrate on code execution rather than prediction of code paths and such. Thanks for that.
I don't think you understand code generation, that, or you're being naive. The compiler is in the best position to determine what code can execute in parallel, and how best to order the instructions to gain maximum speed from the CPU in executing that code. The CPU's task is to cache the most commonly used code, basically doing the duties a profiler would have done back in ye olde DOS days. Determine the most commonly executed code paths and keep them in the cache as long as possible
The only difference between a profiler in the old days and this cache technique is that the profiler allowed the developer to see what code was consuming the most CPU cycles. I suppose then with a profiler for IA-64 PLUS the cacheing of code, you could potentially gain some great speedups in your usual IA-32 code if you compiled it for IA-64.
IMNSHO, IA-64 is the future of Intel desktop CPU's, and the instruction set that they'll ultimately move forward with. It scales well, it puts the work that should be done by the compiler with the compiler, and leaves the CPU with as little to do as possible besides fetching instructions, decoding them, and executing as many of them in parallel as possible. That's all a CPU should do.
Yeah, and that's your only valid point. And I think that's all about to change since AMD appears to be trying to take on Intel in this arena. Now as to whether Prescott (with purported 64-bit extensions) or Itanium comes out as the desktop technology Intel ultimately pushes is anyones guess, but my point still stands-- Intel has 64-bit technology already out there, and it's quite likely that if Prescott's 64-bit extensions are non-existant, that they'll push Itanium's prices down to compete on the desktop.
The thing is, Microsoft has already ported Windows to IA-64, already has compiler technology that targets IA-64 (there's a command line Visual C++ compiler included with the Windows Server 2003 DDK), and wouldn't take much effort to re-target all their bread and butter products (Office, SQL Server, etc) to IA-64 to finish the support off.
The fact that Itanium is uber-expensive now is almost a non-issue-- the reason it's expensive is because Intel KNOWS they can charge that much because they're selling/marketing it as a "server" or "enterprise" solution, not a desktop solution. Rest assured, if it came to desktops, the price would fall and we'd see an "Itanium Xeon" with absurd pricing for the server/enterprise markets to continue feeding Intel's cash cow.
Specifically, not one that's from an actual brick and mortar greeting card maker. 9 times out of 10, you'll be sure to be not only adding YOURSELF (the sender) as a future spam victim, but whoever you entered as a recipient for the e-greeting card.
I concede it was an awful anology. This is what happens when one posts on little sleep. ;) But the point is, any indication that Intel is conceding that 64-bit extensions to IA-32 at the way to go (rather than IA-64, e.g. - Itanium) would be fuel for AMD to use to sell their x86-64 based CPU's. "Look here, Intel is saying 64-bit exntensions are the way to go, and we've got them, now!" Intel won't have Prescott out the door for a little while longer, giving AMD an edge since x86-64 is here right now practically.
The design of the IA-64 architecture is such that it scales well with larger and larger die space. It's designed to be able to execute code in parallel, in fact, that's the cornerstone of the way it encodes instructions (in bundles, with multiple bundles possible to be executed at once if the CPU supports it). IIRC the original Itanium and Itanium 2 don't really exploit this yet, but rest assured, it's something that will make the IA-64 architecture outperform current and future revs of other 64-bit CPU's.
Not to mention the other architectural advances-- which aren't really ingenious, beyond the fact that more CPU registers (for example) saves memory bandwidth, and so on. A lot of the features IA-64 boasts are just logical extensions to IA-32, but some of it is particularly cool since it's very forward looking (the instruction bundles) and will scale well.
Itanium is a late-comer to the server 64-bit market. Itanium is NOT a late-comer to the 64-bit desktop 64-bit market. In the latter case, AMD is the late-comer.
Given the architectural advances inherent in the Itanium's design, I sincerely hope it wins out in the desktop arena when that battle is played out. With AMD releasing their x86-64 CPU's, I imagine this battle will become much more center stage, and maybe we'll see the Itanium (or a desktop variant) seeing some huge price drops sooner rather than later.
IIRC, Microsoft already has versions of Windows that will run on IA-64 hardware, so that just leaves the other killer apps mentioned before to target IA-64 natively to make it a more desirable platform.