The 'skin' of the Zune was a 'rubberized' material that had a smooth seductive feel to it. I found myself unable to stop stroking the device, so much that the demo assistant asked me to put it down.
Laughing off the uncomfortable silence, I focused on the player and the user interface (UI). The interface is amazingly responsive to my actions.
Um... Yeah. looks a news headlines, again. OK... maybe the author just having a little fun with the reader.
Clicking on the "community" button allowed me to see the other two Zunes nearby. I decided to send them my community member a song. Browsed to my music folder, found to a song and, instead of selecting to play it, I chose to send it. Prompted with a list of Zune's nearby, I chose one and sent it. Watching the other Zune, the user was prompted to download and accepted the request. It took less than 20 seconds to send the whole song which included album art.
Sounds lengthy, but if you're trying to chat up a hot prospect 20 seconds is plenty of time to break the ice.
Upon a successful transfer, the music is wrapped with a digital rights management (DRM) layer which will give the user a three day or three-listen license. I don't know about many of our readers, but I can listen to a song over and over again. Three plays... please!
DRM(!) huhhhhh HUUHHHHH huhhhhh HUUHHHHH Welcome to the dark side I wonder if there's something which allows you to add it to a wishlist to buy later if you decide you like it.
Yes, it is a first-generation product but I really like the direction Microsoft is taking with the Zune.
Clearly the reviewer is happy with DRM. Only one model, Hmm.. So when's the Zune Femto coming out?
At first, with my new phone, I thought it was a bit clunky dealing with text messages and voice mail. Now I've come to loathe anyone leaving me a message. I nearly chucked the damn thing this morning. It's something I need tho, so I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with these things. I've been getting frustrated with little electonic gadgets lately because of their increasing complexity. A new car stereo (I suppose I should be calling it Mobile Entertainment Center or sommat) has more crap than I'll even need and I worry a bit about hitting the wrong button when I'm driving (because I don't like to take my eyes off the road) and having to pull off the road somewhere to sort out what the devil it's on about now. It's a delicate balance, between suck and not suck and certainly going to be different for everyone, they can only try to hit the bell-curve of the market in the center.
I don't really care about iPods, but that doesn't sound bad at all. Innovative, no - but maybe it will be competitive or slightly better than other products. Why such the negative attitude?
Maybe someone's planning a reverse Pump-and-Dump? Predict an impending blunder for Apple, watch shares drop, buy shares, wait for Apple to roll out something as addictive to conspicuous consumers as sugar to an 8 year old and then sell when the stock price skies.
Maybe not, maybe he's just having a bad day and his pissant boss told him he had to write something and this is what they came up with.
Excuse me, Mr. Analyst, but I suspect you're underestimating Apple.
I think if Apple actually has something in that line coming out it'll surprise you. Yet another music phone isn't
radical enough for Steve Jobs, battery life or whatever aside, besides, the ROKR was ho-hum which should say something
about what people really want. I wouldn't be suprised to see something clever like combination unit, which
merges a cell phone with an iPod, either could be used independently, probably partnering
with someone like Motorola to make the phone part to spread the risk (assuming Motorola is willing to give it another shot.)
Perhaps it'll also do VoIP in some clever way. Preemptively dropping Apple's shares on such speculation seems a bit rash.
In any event, the iPod is getting on in years, celebrating it's 5th birthday, still going strong, but always
needs some little tweak (like the slim and tiny nano) to keep in interesting and trendy. I agree with the
analysts regarding an integrated unit with battery concerns and such, since most people do keep a separate
mp3 player even when their phone will play tunes. I've got a phone which will play music, but I'd rather not be having to
recharge my battery every day. The most likely place for me to listen to tunes is in the vehicle and it'll have a
CD/sat. radio with USB to handle that. Taking on a commodity market would be fitting oneself for an albatross.
Without coffee, I swear the Air Force would shut down. Coffee is the real black gold.
"OK private, we're all counting on you to get through the lines. We'll try to hold out as long as we can, but you know what we're up against. Now just to be sure you've got it right, repeat your objective."
"Vente mocha soy for Johnson, latte triple shot for Malloy, grand house blend decaf for Morales, because he's trying to cut down, tall cafe' au lait for you, Sarge, iced espresso with whipped creme for Gooch and a double espresso for me."
Please do not look at absolute dollar values, they are nonsense. Look at defense spending as a percentage of GDP. The US defense budget is about the same size as it was during the isolationist period leading up to WWI. In terms of percentage, the US spends about 3.8% of its GDP on defense, putting it in the same area of the list as Tanzania.
Keep in mind that a significant percentage of defence support is now performed by private industry, thus increasing the overall budget and the Pentagon does not perform a considerable amount of services itself. it's said to be more efficient, but when the DoD performed its own services the money largely stayed within the department. Further, these large requests of 70 and 80 billion to support the war on terror, are they included in these figures?
Thanks to the neglect of the military under Clinton, the Air Force has ancient aircraft and can't maintain them all because they break so fast, the Navy has too few ships and many of those still in service have entire systems which are inoperable due to neglect, and the Army can no longer rely on unlimited overseas basing, unlimited Navy sealift and unlimited Air Force airlift and so must get rid of all their heavy artillery and heavy tanks to transform to a lighter force.
The Clinton administration hardly neglected the military. Clinton didn't actively seek out conflicts to expend material on, the largest being the Serbia/Bosnia conflict, which he brought NATO in to a significant degree (as it was most member states' own backyard this seems fair.) Clinton prefered diplomatic engagement, building support over unilateral moves. Clinton was more fiscally conservative than his successor.
Its easy, They said they would award a Trophy.
If they pay $500 for a toilet seat and $250 for a hammer then a nice trophy would be like $2 million.
They could award some kind of voucher to go pick the trophy the winning team wants.
You wouldnt want them stuck with just any $2 million trophy. They should pick the one they want.
I'm sure the government has some kind of voucher that would be good at any trophy shop.
Yea maybe the Govt. bank will back the voucher so you know its good, call it a "Federal Reserve Note" or something like that. 2 million of those ought to do.
I'm rather certain if it worked at all like that it would go something like this:
The award, manufactured by Haliburton Defence Award Company, is to be distributed by Kellog, Brown and Root Trophy Transportation, Logistics & Presentation Division to the recipient, Total Cost $2.7 million for a gold plated plastic chalice atop a particle wood (coated in simulated dark mahogany) stand.
You have to think about how the game is played these days.
[quote]Rocket-powered Army Jeep (for when you need to get out FAST!)[/quote]
Or for soldiers who like to post lame stunt videos on the internet.
I've only seen Royal Army humour videos on YouTube. I certain if I even tried to look I'd find dozens, nay, hundreds of others from US Forces.
I left off a couple of recent developments..
35mm Automatic Schmaltz cannon
Semi-automatic Ganja Ray ("SOLDIER, DO NOT POINT THAT WEAPON AT like, anyone, ok? chill, dude, no need to be, like pointing, it's totally rude, so mellow out, ok?")
The DoD could always offer other forms of remuneration to the winner. Such a awarding contracts for supplies, such as $500 toilet seats and $250 hammers...nyet?
I could be wrong here, but don't think Stanford University is in the business of manufacturing toilet seats or hammers (though I dare say there's probably an ample supply of BFH's in the engineering school) The money awarded a university probably just goes into the general fund, where maybe the board would toss a bit of it as a reward (say, 10%) to the engineering school as a big 'Thank ya'. Awarding Stanford 40,000 toilet seats would be, um, ignominious, though fitting for the way the football team has performed so far.
Stifling innovation- find out the Congress folks who pushed this legislation through and make sure their staff do a little "constituent services"
Not sure exactly what you mean there, but the Defense budget is the largest it has been in ages, it's perplexing that they'd choose to cut here, unless there's some bizarre (well, not in light of the privatisation of many military services and operations) pressure to keep this in other hands, ahem, those which would prefer to sell goods and services they develop at great expense (and thus need reimbursement) and clearly some bunch of college yahoos couldn't do as well.
For someone who has been following the DEC-Intel battle for years, you just had to Google a link that contained absolutely no technical information about what ideas were stolen.
I was actually rather busy eating dinner and retrieving an installation manual for a satellite receiver when I made the prior post. Sorry for the omission --
a pretty detailed run-down, not the usual Slashdot Digest (repleat with spelling and punctuation errors) can be found here, as posted by Andy Glew. It isn't hard to find, just pop 'intel' 'dec' and 'lawsuit' into a search and it fairly pops right up.
NBC Universal, the studio behind "Battlestar," refused to pay residuals or credit the writers of these "Webisodes," claiming they're promotional materials.
not pay writers? sheet. if these people worked for nbc, would nbc not pay them for the time during their work day they wrote?
"you get no pay, peon, that was your break!"
see how they feel if you lift the webisodes an puth them on your own site.
The ideas of superscalar out-of-order processors came from IBM, CDC, Cray, and the academic literature years before either DEC or Intel ever implemented one. Yet when Intel came out with the out-of-order Pentium Pro, all the DEC guys were screaming and hollering.
Just did a few minuts googling and came up with this I was off on the amount, remembering hearing $425 million, where it was actually $700 million Intel paid (though it could have been $425M was for the chip fab and the remainder was licensing, legal fees, etc.)
There used to be a list of the IP on Usenet and it could probably be found without much difficulty, but I don't recall out-of-order being one of them. I remember Branch-Prediction being one. Intel claimed to have a solid case until they were sunk by a load of internal documents from Intel showing up in DEC's hands, where Intel personnel, IIRC Andy Grove being one of them, laughing off their theft of IP. Intel chose to settle with DEC outside court because in court could have been an injuction on Pentium processors and the Merced, which would pretty much have killed Intel.
Re:DEC Alpha engineers at AMD- yer a bit confused
on
SGI Arises From the Ashes
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Uh, yer history is wrong. all wrong. DEC never got the cash.
Intel contacted their "buddy" Compaq to buyout DEC, and shutdown the lawsuit.
Poof goes DEC and everything else, and all of Intels troubles soon vanish.
If I was going to post a lot of rubbish like that, I'd do it under AC, also. I'm assuming this is actually a troll, but I'll bite anyway. The suit concluded, out of court long before Compaq entered the scene. There was no judgement to go poof and Compaq would be absolute fools to let, IIRC 425 million $ go away, not and keep their executives anyway, no board would buy a company and forgive a large settlement like that.
Intel went on to manufacturer later Alphas under their agreement with DEC before they closed down the fab.
Re:SGI appears to be out of the graphics business
on
SGI Arises From the Ashes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you look at their website, they say pretty clearly that they are now focused on high performance computing and storage devices. You won't see graphics mentioned on there anywhere, except for their soon to be discontinued MIPS workstation lines. They do mention visualization of data sets over networks, and in planetariums, but this is really more of a services offering. The days of buying a high performance graphics workstation from SGI appear to be over for now.
Wouldn't surprise me, but is it really worth all the money to keep this company going to make commodity hardware and storage systems? Any schmuck could do that without starting out with all that debt.
Many of the Alpha engineers transitioned to AMD. That's why we've seen such great developments from AMD over the past few years. While Intel was fucking around with the failure that became the Itanium, AMD had some of the greatest processor designers ever working on the Opteron. And the end result is as would be expected: the Opteron is the premiere general purpose processor around.
For years I followed the battle between DEC and Intel, over Intel stealing a dozen or so technologies from DEC, which they implemented in the Pentium and Itanic (Merced at the time) DEC waited until Intel was commited to their theft before lowering the boom. Ultimately Intel settled with DEC, gaining access to the patents and having to fork over a very considerable amount of money for DEC's processor fab, which IIRC Intel shut down anyway. Oddly enough, after all this cash poured into DEC they still went bust. I think, too, a lot of the smarter fish left DEC when they saw that ship foundering near the rocks of poor market direction.
That was a fantastic misunderstanding, Captain Autistic.
My guess is he forgot to what he was replying because his addiction to internet surfing, Alt-tabbing between a dozen pages, left him dazed and confused. Let's hope someone else has his keys.
I don't think it's simply a matter of making the hardware, but having the brains left to design it. SGI once came out with the
greatest stuff, but now loads of that all fits on one video card or multiple video cards with shared GPUs. Of course their
old business model wasn't just to sell you the machine, but to license the software, operating system, sell support etc. Not many
can do that these days, like they did in the days of yore.
We just keep the old topics around so it's still possible to find old stories related to them. Sometimes (like now!) they even still come in handy.
Call me a dreamer, but I keep hoping some day these guys
will arise from the ashes of HP/Compaq and Intel.
Introducing the PDP-11/128 and the VAX 9990! (2-AAA cell batteries not included.)
I'm fairly certain that your brother's concept of addiction is not the same as the medical concept of addiction.
Well, as we all know there's Theoretical and then there's Practical knowledge. He served as a probation officer for about 20 years. Many of those who passed through his care were there for reasons related to the alcolhol consumption, DUI's, spouse abuse, assault and battery, etc.
There is a difference between being an alcoholic and being drunk.
As my brother, a probation officer who did his masters thesis on alcoholism, put it: If you need a drink, even once a year, you are an alcoholic. I once thought it was extreme, but now see his point. He certainly met a lot of people who could rationalise themselves into believing anything except that they had a problem. The guy who tried to follow me up my driveway, because it was too dark to see my tail lights and had a BAL of.11 didn't think he had a problem at all.
As a friend put it, people have personalities, not just genetic code, which make them more easily addicted, obsessive/compulsive.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm just weird, but when I go somewhere to meet girls, I dont even bring my mp3 player.
What is the most common vehicle for marketing? Even if it's far removed from reality... Come one, you know what it is.
Um... Yeah. looks a news headlines, again. OK... maybe the author just having a little fun with the reader.
Clicking on the "community" button allowed me to see the other two Zunes nearby. I decided to send them my community member a song. Browsed to my music folder, found to a song and, instead of selecting to play it, I chose to send it. Prompted with a list of Zune's nearby, I chose one and sent it. Watching the other Zune, the user was prompted to download and accepted the request. It took less than 20 seconds to send the whole song which included album art.
Sounds lengthy, but if you're trying to chat up a hot prospect 20 seconds is plenty of time to break the ice.
Upon a successful transfer, the music is wrapped with a digital rights management (DRM) layer which will give the user a three day or three-listen license. I don't know about many of our readers, but I can listen to a song over and over again. Three plays... please!
DRM(!) huhhhhh HUUHHHHH huhhhhh HUUHHHHH Welcome to the dark side I wonder if there's something which allows you to add it to a wishlist to buy later if you decide you like it.
Yes, it is a first-generation product but I really like the direction Microsoft is taking with the Zune.
Clearly the reviewer is happy with DRM. Only one model, Hmm.. So when's the Zune Femto coming out?
And the phone part has to not suck too.
At first, with my new phone, I thought it was a bit clunky dealing with text messages and voice mail. Now I've come to loathe anyone leaving me a message. I nearly chucked the damn thing this morning. It's something I need tho, so I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with these things. I've been getting frustrated with little electonic gadgets lately because of their increasing complexity. A new car stereo (I suppose I should be calling it Mobile Entertainment Center or sommat) has more crap than I'll even need and I worry a bit about hitting the wrong button when I'm driving (because I don't like to take my eyes off the road) and having to pull off the road somewhere to sort out what the devil it's on about now. It's a delicate balance, between suck and not suck and certainly going to be different for everyone, they can only try to hit the bell-curve of the market in the center.
I don't really care about iPods, but that doesn't sound bad at all. Innovative, no - but maybe it will be competitive or slightly better than other products. Why such the negative attitude?
Maybe someone's planning a reverse Pump-and-Dump? Predict an impending blunder for Apple, watch shares drop, buy shares, wait for Apple to roll out something as addictive to conspicuous consumers as sugar to an 8 year old and then sell when the stock price skies.
Maybe not, maybe he's just having a bad day and his pissant boss told him he had to write something and this is what they came up with.
Excuse me, Mr. Analyst, but I suspect you're underestimating Apple.
I think if Apple actually has something in that line coming out it'll surprise you. Yet another music phone isn't radical enough for Steve Jobs, battery life or whatever aside, besides, the ROKR was ho-hum which should say something about what people really want. I wouldn't be suprised to see something clever like combination unit, which merges a cell phone with an iPod, either could be used independently, probably partnering with someone like Motorola to make the phone part to spread the risk (assuming Motorola is willing to give it another shot.) Perhaps it'll also do VoIP in some clever way. Preemptively dropping Apple's shares on such speculation seems a bit rash.
In any event, the iPod is getting on in years, celebrating it's 5th birthday, still going strong, but always needs some little tweak (like the slim and tiny nano) to keep in interesting and trendy. I agree with the analysts regarding an integrated unit with battery concerns and such, since most people do keep a separate mp3 player even when their phone will play tunes. I've got a phone which will play music, but I'd rather not be having to recharge my battery every day. The most likely place for me to listen to tunes is in the vehicle and it'll have a CD/sat. radio with USB to handle that. Taking on a commodity market would be fitting oneself for an albatross.
Without coffee, I swear the Air Force would shut down. Coffee is the real black gold.
"OK private, we're all counting on you to get through the lines. We'll try to hold out as long as we can, but you know what we're up against. Now just to be sure you've got it right, repeat your objective."
"Vente mocha soy for Johnson, latte triple shot for Malloy, grand house blend decaf for Morales, because he's trying to cut down, tall cafe' au lait for you, Sarge, iced espresso with whipped creme for Gooch and a double espresso for me."
"Good lad, off you go!"
Please do not look at absolute dollar values, they are nonsense. Look at defense spending as a percentage of GDP. The US defense budget is about the same size as it was during the isolationist period leading up to WWI. In terms of percentage, the US spends about 3.8% of its GDP on defense, putting it in the same area of the list as Tanzania.
Keep in mind that a significant percentage of defence support is now performed by private industry, thus increasing the overall budget and the Pentagon does not perform a considerable amount of services itself. it's said to be more efficient, but when the DoD performed its own services the money largely stayed within the department. Further, these large requests of 70 and 80 billion to support the war on terror, are they included in these figures?
Thanks to the neglect of the military under Clinton, the Air Force has ancient aircraft and can't maintain them all because they break so fast, the Navy has too few ships and many of those still in service have entire systems which are inoperable due to neglect, and the Army can no longer rely on unlimited overseas basing, unlimited Navy sealift and unlimited Air Force airlift and so must get rid of all their heavy artillery and heavy tanks to transform to a lighter force.
The Clinton administration hardly neglected the military. Clinton didn't actively seek out conflicts to expend material on, the largest being the Serbia/Bosnia conflict, which he brought NATO in to a significant degree (as it was most member states' own backyard this seems fair.) Clinton prefered diplomatic engagement, building support over unilateral moves. Clinton was more fiscally conservative than his successor.
Its easy, They said they would award a Trophy. If they pay $500 for a toilet seat and $250 for a hammer then a nice trophy would be like $2 million. They could award some kind of voucher to go pick the trophy the winning team wants. You wouldnt want them stuck with just any $2 million trophy. They should pick the one they want. I'm sure the government has some kind of voucher that would be good at any trophy shop. Yea maybe the Govt. bank will back the voucher so you know its good, call it a "Federal Reserve Note" or something like that. 2 million of those ought to do.
I'm rather certain if it worked at all like that it would go something like this:
The award, manufactured by Haliburton Defence Award Company, is to be distributed by Kellog, Brown and Root Trophy Transportation, Logistics & Presentation Division to the recipient, Total Cost $2.7 million for a gold plated plastic chalice atop a particle wood (coated in simulated dark mahogany) stand.
You have to think about how the game is played these days.
[quote]Rocket-powered Army Jeep (for when you need to get out FAST!)[/quote]
Or for soldiers who like to post lame stunt videos on the internet.
I've only seen Royal Army humour videos on YouTube. I certain if I even tried to look I'd find dozens, nay, hundreds of others from US Forces.
I left off a couple of recent developments..
The DoD could always offer other forms of remuneration to the winner. Such a awarding contracts for supplies, such as $500 toilet seats and $250 hammers...nyet?
I could be wrong here, but don't think Stanford University is in the business of manufacturing toilet seats or hammers (though I dare say there's probably an ample supply of BFH's in the engineering school) The money awarded a university probably just goes into the general fund, where maybe the board would toss a bit of it as a reward (say, 10%) to the engineering school as a big 'Thank ya'. Awarding Stanford 40,000 toilet seats would be, um, ignominious, though fitting for the way the football team has performed so far.
Stifling innovation- find out the Congress folks who pushed this legislation through and make sure their staff do a little "constituent services"
Not sure exactly what you mean there, but the Defense budget is the largest it has been in ages, it's perplexing that they'd choose to cut here, unless there's some bizarre (well, not in light of the privatisation of many military services and operations) pressure to keep this in other hands, ahem, those which would prefer to sell goods and services they develop at great expense (and thus need reimbursement) and clearly some bunch of college yahoos couldn't do as well.
So much for recovering my development expenses on these ideas:
note: Sharks with Lasers is someone else's idea so I clearly can't try to compete with that one.
From the artcle: Our servers get the trust information from a database supplied by GeoTrust
However, to get at GeoTrust, a party would likely have to sue Opera. IANAL, but Opera would, likely be viewed as complicit.
Can you see the up-coming /. headline?
c4n4d14n ph4m4c13 Files Defamation Claim Against Opera and GeoTrust
Those that Opera has identifies as fraudulent will be automatically blocked by the browser.'"
Seems to recall this can lead Opera to trouble, like what happened with Spamhaus.
For someone who has been following the DEC-Intel battle for years, you just had to Google a link that contained absolutely no technical information about what ideas were stolen.
I was actually rather busy eating dinner and retrieving an installation manual for a satellite receiver when I made the prior post. Sorry for the omission -- a pretty detailed run-down, not the usual Slashdot Digest (repleat with spelling and punctuation errors) can be found here, as posted by Andy Glew. It isn't hard to find, just pop 'intel' 'dec' and 'lawsuit' into a search and it fairly pops right up.
NBC Universal, the studio behind "Battlestar," refused to pay residuals or credit the writers of these "Webisodes," claiming they're promotional materials.
not pay writers? sheet. if these people worked for nbc, would nbc not pay them for the time during their work day they wrote?
"you get no pay, peon, that was your break!"see how they feel if you lift the webisodes an puth them on your own site.
This is a load of crap.
Your post certainly is.
The ideas of superscalar out-of-order processors came from IBM, CDC, Cray, and the academic literature years before either DEC or Intel ever implemented one. Yet when Intel came out with the out-of-order Pentium Pro, all the DEC guys were screaming and hollering.
Just did a few minuts googling and came up with this I was off on the amount, remembering hearing $425 million, where it was actually $700 million Intel paid (though it could have been $425M was for the chip fab and the remainder was licensing, legal fees, etc.)
There used to be a list of the IP on Usenet and it could probably be found without much difficulty, but I don't recall out-of-order being one of them. I remember Branch-Prediction being one. Intel claimed to have a solid case until they were sunk by a load of internal documents from Intel showing up in DEC's hands, where Intel personnel, IIRC Andy Grove being one of them, laughing off their theft of IP. Intel chose to settle with DEC outside court because in court could have been an injuction on Pentium processors and the Merced, which would pretty much have killed Intel.
Uh, yer history is wrong. all wrong. DEC never got the cash. Intel contacted their "buddy" Compaq to buyout DEC, and shutdown the lawsuit. Poof goes DEC and everything else, and all of Intels troubles soon vanish.
If I was going to post a lot of rubbish like that, I'd do it under AC, also. I'm assuming this is actually a troll, but I'll bite anyway. The suit concluded, out of court long before Compaq entered the scene. There was no judgement to go poof and Compaq would be absolute fools to let, IIRC 425 million $ go away, not and keep their executives anyway, no board would buy a company and forgive a large settlement like that.
Intel went on to manufacturer later Alphas under their agreement with DEC before they closed down the fab.
If you look at their website, they say pretty clearly that they are now focused on high performance computing and storage devices. You won't see graphics mentioned on there anywhere, except for their soon to be discontinued MIPS workstation lines. They do mention visualization of data sets over networks, and in planetariums, but this is really more of a services offering. The days of buying a high performance graphics workstation from SGI appear to be over for now.
Wouldn't surprise me, but is it really worth all the money to keep this company going to make commodity hardware and storage systems? Any schmuck could do that without starting out with all that debt.
No, he was talking about actual "death throws". Like when Steve Ballmer gets ahold of a chair.
There's a new show for prime time ... celebrity cadaver throwing.
Many of the Alpha engineers transitioned to AMD. That's why we've seen such great developments from AMD over the past few years. While Intel was fucking around with the failure that became the Itanium, AMD had some of the greatest processor designers ever working on the Opteron. And the end result is as would be expected: the Opteron is the premiere general purpose processor around.
For years I followed the battle between DEC and Intel, over Intel stealing a dozen or so technologies from DEC, which they implemented in the Pentium and Itanic (Merced at the time) DEC waited until Intel was commited to their theft before lowering the boom. Ultimately Intel settled with DEC, gaining access to the patents and having to fork over a very considerable amount of money for DEC's processor fab, which IIRC Intel shut down anyway. Oddly enough, after all this cash poured into DEC they still went bust. I think, too, a lot of the smarter fish left DEC when they saw that ship foundering near the rocks of poor market direction.
That was a fantastic misunderstanding, Captain Autistic.
My guess is he forgot to what he was replying because his addiction to internet surfing, Alt-tabbing between a dozen pages, left him dazed and confused. Let's hope someone else has his keys.
I don't think it's simply a matter of making the hardware, but having the brains left to design it. SGI once came out with the greatest stuff, but now loads of that all fits on one video card or multiple video cards with shared GPUs. Of course their old business model wasn't just to sell you the machine, but to license the software, operating system, sell support etc. Not many can do that these days, like they did in the days of yore.
We just keep the old topics around so it's still possible to find old stories related to them. Sometimes (like now!) they even still come in handy.
Call me a dreamer, but I keep hoping some day these guys will arise from the ashes of HP/Compaq and Intel.
Introducing the PDP-11/128 and the VAX 9990! (2-AAA cell batteries not included.)
I'm fairly certain that your brother's concept of addiction is not the same as the medical concept of addiction.
Well, as we all know there's Theoretical and then there's Practical knowledge. He served as a probation officer for about 20 years. Many of those who passed through his care were there for reasons related to the alcolhol consumption, DUI's, spouse abuse, assault and battery, etc.
There is a difference between being an alcoholic and being drunk.
As my brother, a probation officer who did his masters thesis on alcoholism, put it: If you need a drink, even once a year, you are an alcoholic. I once thought it was extreme, but now see his point. He certainly met a lot of people who could rationalise themselves into believing anything except that they had a problem. The guy who tried to follow me up my driveway, because it was too dark to see my tail lights and had a BAL of .11 didn't think he had a problem at all.
As a friend put it, people have personalities, not just genetic code, which make them more easily addicted, obsessive/compulsive.