Absolutely, the pc industry has reached a state of temporary maturity and the desktop pc is becoming a commodity. Consumers are begining to realise that they do not need to pay for a race tuned engine in their daily runnabout and are spending the money on other things.
This change in processor naming may also signal another significant change away from the general purpose processor. Given that clever design has given AMD chips similar performance to Intel chips with higher clock speed it is apparent that clock speed increases are losing their marketing appeal. It is also mind bogglingly expensive to keep on ramping clock speed through improved manufacturing processes.
My guess is that Intel has taken a strategic decision to spend more money on a new range of diversified processors targeted at different markets. Multimedia consumer devices are a case in point, a processor to play DVD's and games on a television could be produced with the video processing onboard. A business cpu could be produced with thin client capabilities built in. A traditional cpu could continue to be produced allowing offboard graphics processing for gaming.
It is apparent that consumers are just begining to realise that they dont need to spend a premium for a faster clock speed processor. Almost all consumer applications can be run on the slowest clock speed processor made these days. Intels marketing bang for a buck is probably going to come from bigger chips with more integration of pheripherals in the short term rather than from smaller faster chips. Hence a need to de-emphasise the clock speed and to concentrate on the function of the chip. I look forward to the Mediaplexor, Servertron, Deskexec, Portacoolon and Gameboss processors, all available in Super04 Mega04 and Exreem04 versions (04b if the process changes this year and 05 versions if they change next year).
Why compete with AMD when you can create a completely new market and own it from the start?
Evidence for processor clock speed variability and techniques used to reduce it in production can be found in this IBM paper http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/462/ shahidi.html In particular table 2 identifies sources of variation
A tightly controled population is still capable of buying as much Nike Coke MacDonalds and Ford as a free one. Business is probably also doing very nicely with a very loose regulatory framework.
What people missunderstand about China is that though it comes from a place of centralised state economic control, that the government is strongly committed to rapid economic growth. Growth that is happening. There are many contries that have gone from largely agricultural economies to modern industrialisation in 20 to 30 years. Spain is a good example. South Korea differs from North Korea mainly in its political and legal institutions. Modernising policies in China could make China as sucessfull as South Korea in a very short period of time.
Appart from being overly paranoid this is an elloquent list of good reasons to have good relations with the Pakistan government. The world is full of crooks of one kind or another and crime can be dealt with quite effectively by extraditing the crooks to the place where they comitted the crime.
There is some difficulty about agreeing on what constitutes a crime depending on your society so there will allways be a need to try and block some internet content depending on who you are. The french sucesfully forced EBay to remove Nazi memorabilia from its local site, I dont think they have had any affect on US Ebay. China currently blocks most of the rest of the world out.
As is often noted about virus writers, spam senders do at least illustrate the vunerability of our systems to attack and test our defences. Worst case scenario we could probably pull the plug on a country to force the politicians to catch the people attacking us.
Sadly it may be true that a lot of spam does not generate a viable money trail. Consider for example that the travelling snake oil salesman survived as much because the sales pitch was entertaining and drew crowds for the entertainment value. I'll bet that the purchasers were fully aware that the products they bought wouldnt make them live forever or whatever.
A lot of spam fails this test completely, in advertising terms its rubbish; bereft of any entertainment value at all. Mind you this goes for a lot of advertising on the internet, it falls a long way behind the entertainment value of a prime time tv video advertisment. I dread the thought that future spam could get good enough to make us watch it for the entertainment value. This will probably happen when it turns into a 20Mb video clip, any guesses as to when this will happen?
no no no, you cannot ignore all UN treaties and bomb their weapons of mass emailing to destruction just because they are outside your boarders. Oh drat you allready do that.
More seriously, if the product is sold from a business inside the US then you should be able to recover damages from them and shut down offshore spamming activities that way. No bombing required...
Good point, I slump corrected.. you remind me that there is a do not call list for unsolicted calls in the UK and I should call them... On the other hand there wouldnt be anything to rant about if the calls stopped. I prefer the opt in model for unsolicitated email rather than the opt out model for spam telephone calls in any case.
I seem to recall citizen Smith was similarly happy with the 24/7 broadcasts of wisdom of the LEADER in 1984, eventually. It might be your choice to pollute your brain with manipulative messages but most of humanity would prefer the choice of privacy given the opportunity. This is about the freedom to choose what is being communicated to you. It strikes me as curious that a great deal of heat and light can be generated by a naked breast on television but we all seem to have accepted that great sporting events are frequently interrupted by offtopic advertising. I for one can do without brand names being rammed down my throat all day long. At least the wierd guy yelling on the street might have something interesting to say, may even be posting here.
On the other hand take a look at a random inbox like John@malinator.com
There seem to be 10 spam messages lurking there ready to pounce on you and suck your brains out.
I cant be bothered to create a new account, I have a suspicion that they might harvest my sending address. Maybe someone braver would like to check it out and reveal the results for us all.
Like my science teacher always said - the best way to test a theory is by experiment...
Absolutely, the people whinging on this thread havent so far given me a single good reason why big business isnt doing a good thing by taking out spammers.
Its a pity however that a large and powerfull beast with teeth and claws to match, hasnt found some justification for defenestrating cold telephone callers. Not only is my answerphone now full of aborted autodialer messages but the ones that do get through have now started slamming down the phone faster than I can when they realise I'm stringing them along and have no interest in any product sold over the telephone. Dang I dont even get a pinch of fun out of it these days...
In a seperate thread though I could consider arguing what evil behaviour big business should be prevented from exercising by legislative restrictions. On this occasion though I vote for "go boy go, tear his arms and legs off!"
Agreed, business logic of overclocked CPUs is slightly different as the chips genuinely do have different speeds at some point in their history (if only in simulation in the worst case) but do not always continue to do so.
When a processor first comes to market the production process is full of variablility which ends up being reflected in the reliable maximum clock rates of the CPUs. Something like the normal or Gaussian distribution will apply to the spread of clock speeds. This is why the fastest chips are often in short supply and also why a premium price can be charged for them. As the production technology and minor mask set shrinks (Stepping?) is improved the number of fast chips increases. At some point the production process may become so good that all the chips produced will run at the fastest speed of the first production run. Additionaly overclocking a chip may be possible with reduced reliablilty because the test vector that failed the chip at the manufacturer is rarely exercised on the home users machine. The manufacturer is not going to be selling chips which might fail in some mission critical application so lables them appropriately.
I think that the manufacture continues to sell a range of chip speeds for several reasons in addition to the one you cite. There is no guarantee that the manufacturing process will remain stable with high yields of fast chips and the spread price model for chip speeds is always needed for a new generation of chips. Initialy at least there is no marketing driven reason for fooling customers by selling them something which has been artificially degraded.
True a strong society is also a brave society that looks after itself.
But it is also simplistic to believe that weapons and wars alone can solve problems. Leading in science and technology is pretty good propaganda for your system.
Failing to extend the life of Hubble could be just as much a weakness of will as failing to execrcise military power. One hopes that terminating Hubble is for sound scientific budgetary reasons rather than a lack of guts to use the somewhat unreliable shuttle. I have no wish to see more deaths in the space program, the odds are still pretty good, I'd go and fix it. I hope it will be kept going for as long as is reasonably possible.
All the things on this list were available as someone elses product before they were built into the operating system. It is a more useful operating system as a result but hardly innovative.
The high profits made on this software do not appear to be justified as Microsoft is taking profits at the mature end of a products lifetime rather than at the introduction of the product. Something it is only able to do becase of its monopoly. Whether this is reducing the ammount of money being spent on innovative software is an unknown. It may be possible that the high prices of Microsoft products are actually raising the price of all software because user expectation is for high prices.
Open source IT infrastructure is becoming available from databases to desktops. This is true competition and since Microsoft has gone over to a rental software model for businesses the costs can be directly compared to Open Source. The true test of whether Microsoft is overcharging will come in the next few years. Given the very slow take up of Open Source solutions it looks like they must be giving relatively good value. What is more worrying is whether Microsoft is contributing to the advancement of software or not. There doesnt seem to be much evidence for it if the best we can say about a new edition of the operating system is that it includes a lot of progams previously available as addons.
Intel is manifestly spending its profits on new processor technologys though the market may be maturing to the point now where the search for ever more powerfull microprocessors may be comming to an end. Simply because the majority of the market will not need anything more powerfull. The only thing I can think of which might be counted as innovative in the operating system and needing the power of a new generation of microprocessors would be speech recognition coupled with artificial intelligence. Other than that the pc has become as boring as a fridge.
There is a difference between reducing costs by the advancement of technology and reducing costs by redistributing labour. Both are inevitable through the action of market forces but only advancing technology increases overall wealth. A printer cartridge standard qualifies as an advancement in technology.
In any case both changes should be supported by a social framework which can reuse the displaced labour through retraining. It is a similar economic question as to whether women should join the educated workforce. A state which does not take advantage of all of its available resources is less economically efficient than one which does.
Exactly, your moral judgement may say "take an eye for an eye" and you execute the hitman. But if you want to stop paid for killings you should have greater deterrent punishment for the hitmans paymaster. Its a straightforward economic question of supply and demand - what law gives you the greatest bang for your moral imperative.
I think that to be fair to Lawyers in general we should recall that many of them took up law studies because of an aptitude and interest in the interpretation and application of Law. Much as a nuclear scientist is motivated by an interest in physics and then may go on to work on weapons or medical fields.
If we choose to employ lawyers in dubious disputes it is their paymasters we should be criticising and not automatically the lawyers themselves.
At the end of the day it is the politicians job to create the framework under which the law operates and we should remind ourselves that through the operation of democracy we can change the politicians.
Of course you can argue that an individual can choose to work for different causes and that greed often motivates the choice but you can vote for social engineering through the tax system or other mechanisms.
I dont have any particular political alliegance but I have a strong suspicion that there is undue influence on the political process by pressure groups with a lot of money. Removing undue influence by money applies as much to politics as it does to lawyers.
Soviet style systems are a dead duck but I see serious cracks in the US too, however there doesnt seem to be a candidate guiding principal to improve the situation at the momment. Maybe society is so complicated now that a single guiding principal isnt enough, we could sure do with something to rally round and believe in these days. Penguin power perhaps is one of them:=)
You should read the British tabloid newspapers to understand what bias and spin realy mean, the BBC is still free from a politicaly biased editorial line. (At least as far as english-white-anglo-saxon-middle-class-protestant people are capable of being)
Incidentaly the appointment of Greg Dyke as Chief Executive was greeted with complaints that he was biased towards the Labour government and therefore unsuitable.
The BBC did not have a position on a political issue, what they did was to incorrectly report that the government had "sexed up" an account of Iraqs military capabilities prior to the vote on going to war. The BBC's error was in not fully investigating Gilligans assertions and then retracting his errors.
Of course you could also blame Greg Dyke for fostering a more commercial attitude amongst BBC news reporting because he felt that as demonstrated by the behavior of the sucessfull commercial "free press" this was what the public wanted to hear. To this extent you are correct, sensational journalism is part of the ratings war. However it should not be allowed to affect the standards of the BBC as a news reporting organisation. This does not affect the ability of a media organisation to broadcast speculation and contrasting opinions, so long as their provenance is clear and it is not reported as hard news.
I dont think anybody is seriously going to sit there with a backdoor virus on their machine. (not with the ammount of work that went into the desktop themes etc). The only people who might actually leave a virus on their machine wouldnt understand or be interested in the SCO debate.
Also whoever wrote the virus obviously doesnt realy give a monkeys about the open software movement, they just wanted to attack SCO. More likely is that the writer is a loner with no affiliations who wanted to demonstrate their cleverness. They must be pissed off that even slashdot thinks that they are an scumbag. I myself would not object strongly if the virus writer gets cancer and dies soon.
I dont know about the new york times, but the BBC has a world wide reputation for unbiased news reporting. The fact that both the Chairman and Chief Executive both resigned because of a couple of unverifiable sentances that turned out to be wrong uttered by Andrew Gilligan tends to suggest that they take this seriously. I can assure you that your jibe will be recognised as the result of small minded childishness by most readers.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely, the pc industry has reached a state of temporary maturity and the desktop pc is becoming a commodity. Consumers are begining to realise that they do not need to pay for a race tuned engine in their daily runnabout and are spending the money on other things.
This change in processor naming may also signal another significant change away from the general purpose processor. Given that clever design has given AMD chips similar performance to Intel chips with higher clock speed it is apparent that clock speed increases are losing their marketing appeal. It is also mind bogglingly expensive to keep on ramping clock speed through improved manufacturing processes.
My guess is that Intel has taken a strategic decision to spend more money on a new range of diversified processors targeted at different markets. Multimedia consumer devices are a case in point, a processor to play DVD's and games on a television could be produced with the video processing onboard. A business cpu could be produced with thin client capabilities built in. A traditional cpu could continue to be produced allowing offboard graphics processing for gaming.
It is apparent that consumers are just begining to realise that they dont need to spend a premium for a faster clock speed processor. Almost all consumer applications can be run on the slowest clock speed processor made these days. Intels marketing bang for a buck is probably going to come from bigger chips with more integration of pheripherals in the short term rather than from smaller faster chips. Hence a need to de-emphasise the clock speed and to concentrate on the function of the chip. I look forward to the Mediaplexor, Servertron, Deskexec, Portacoolon and Gameboss processors, all available in Super04 Mega04 and Exreem04 versions (04b if the process changes this year and 05 versions if they change next year).
Why compete with AMD when you can create a completely new market and own it from the start?
Evidence for processor clock speed variability and techniques used to reduce it in production can be found in this IBM paper/ shahidi .html
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/462
In particular table 2 identifies sources of variation
A tightly controled population is still capable of buying as much Nike Coke MacDonalds and Ford as a free one. Business is probably also doing very nicely with a very loose regulatory framework.
What people missunderstand about China is that though it comes from a place of centralised state economic control, that the government is strongly committed to rapid economic growth. Growth that is happening. There are many contries that have gone from largely agricultural economies to modern industrialisation in 20 to 30 years. Spain is a good example. South Korea differs from North Korea mainly in its political and legal institutions. Modernising policies in China could make China as sucessfull as South Korea in a very short period of time.
Appart from being overly paranoid this is an elloquent list of good reasons to have good relations with the Pakistan government. The world is full of crooks of one kind or another and crime can be dealt with quite effectively by extraditing the crooks to the place where they comitted the crime.
There is some difficulty about agreeing on what constitutes a crime depending on your society so there will allways be a need to try and block some internet content depending on who you are. The french sucesfully forced EBay to remove Nazi memorabilia from its local site, I dont think they have had any affect on US Ebay. China currently blocks most of the rest of the world out.
As is often noted about virus writers, spam senders do at least illustrate the vunerability of our systems to attack and test our defences. Worst case scenario we could probably pull the plug on a country to force the politicians to catch the people attacking us.
Sadly it may be true that a lot of spam does not generate a viable money trail. Consider for example that the travelling snake oil salesman survived as much because the sales pitch was entertaining and drew crowds for the entertainment value. I'll bet that the purchasers were fully aware that the products they bought wouldnt make them live forever or whatever.
A lot of spam fails this test completely, in advertising terms its rubbish; bereft of any entertainment value at all. Mind you this goes for a lot of advertising on the internet, it falls a long way behind the entertainment value of a prime time tv video advertisment. I dread the thought that future spam could get good enough to make us watch it for the entertainment value. This will probably happen when it turns into a 20Mb video clip, any guesses as to when this will happen?
no no no, you cannot ignore all UN treaties and bomb their weapons of mass emailing to destruction just because they are outside your boarders. Oh drat you allready do that.
More seriously, if the product is sold from a business inside the US then you should be able to recover damages from them and shut down offshore spamming activities that way. No bombing required...
Good point, I slump corrected.. you remind me that there is a do not call list for unsolicted calls in the UK and I should call them... On the other hand there wouldnt be anything to rant about if the calls stopped. I prefer the opt in model for unsolicitated email rather than the opt out model for spam telephone calls in any case.
I seem to recall citizen Smith was similarly happy with the 24/7 broadcasts of wisdom of the LEADER in 1984, eventually. It might be your choice to pollute your brain with manipulative messages but most of humanity would prefer the choice of privacy given the opportunity. This is about the freedom to choose what is being communicated to you. It strikes me as curious that a great deal of heat and light can be generated by a naked breast on television but we all seem to have accepted that great sporting events are frequently interrupted by offtopic advertising. I for one can do without brand names being rammed down my throat all day long. At least the wierd guy yelling on the street might have something interesting to say, may even be posting here.
Quick, cool competition for your next lan party
Set up a free mail account then you have 24 hours to harvest spam by broadcasting your address. Bonus points for virus infections and malware!
Winner has the most spam at the end of the day!
Extra points for rapidity of enlargement etc..
Looks fun in a nerdy sort of way.
On the other hand take a look at a random inbox like John@malinator.com
There seem to be 10 spam messages lurking there ready to pounce on you and suck your brains out.
I cant be bothered to create a new account, I have a suspicion that they might harvest my sending address. Maybe someone braver would like to check it out and reveal the results for us all.
Like my science teacher always said - the best way to test a theory is by experiment...
Absolutely, the people whinging on this thread havent so far given me a single good reason why big business isnt doing a good thing by taking out spammers.
Its a pity however that a large and powerfull beast with teeth and claws to match, hasnt found some justification for defenestrating cold telephone callers. Not only is my answerphone now full of aborted autodialer messages but the ones that do get through have now started slamming down the phone faster than I can when they realise I'm stringing them along and have no interest in any product sold over the telephone. Dang I dont even get a pinch of fun out of it these days...
In a seperate thread though I could consider arguing what evil behaviour big business should be prevented from exercising by legislative restrictions. On this occasion though I vote for "go boy go, tear his arms and legs off!"
Agreed, business logic of overclocked CPUs is slightly different as the chips genuinely do have different speeds at some point in their history (if only in simulation in the worst case) but do not always continue to do so.
When a processor first comes to market the production process is full of variablility which ends up being reflected in the reliable maximum clock rates of the CPUs. Something like the normal or Gaussian distribution will apply to the spread of clock speeds. This is why the fastest chips are often in short supply and also why a premium price can be charged for them. As the production technology and minor mask set shrinks (Stepping?) is improved the number of fast chips increases. At some point the production process may become so good that all the chips produced will run at the fastest speed of the first production run. Additionaly overclocking a chip may be possible with reduced reliablilty because the test vector that failed the chip at the manufacturer is rarely exercised on the home users machine. The manufacturer is not going to be selling chips which might fail in some mission critical application so lables them appropriately.
I think that the manufacture continues to sell a range of chip speeds for several reasons in addition to the one you cite. There is no guarantee that the manufacturing process will remain stable with high yields of fast chips and the spread price model for chip speeds is always needed for a new generation of chips. Initialy at least there is no marketing driven reason for fooling customers by selling them something which has been artificially degraded.
True a strong society is also a brave society that looks after itself.
But it is also simplistic to believe that weapons and wars alone can solve problems. Leading in science and technology is pretty good propaganda for your system.
Failing to extend the life of Hubble could be just as much a weakness of will as failing to execrcise military power. One hopes that terminating Hubble is for sound scientific budgetary reasons rather than a lack of guts to use the somewhat unreliable shuttle. I have no wish to see more deaths in the space program, the odds are still pretty good, I'd go and fix it. I hope it will be kept going for as long as is reasonably possible.
All the things on this list were available as someone elses product before they were built into the operating system. It is a more useful operating system as a result but hardly innovative.
The high profits made on this software do not appear to be justified as Microsoft is taking profits at the mature end of a products lifetime rather than at the introduction of the product. Something it is only able to do becase of its monopoly. Whether this is reducing the ammount of money being spent on innovative software is an unknown. It may be possible that the high prices of Microsoft products are actually raising the price of all software because user expectation is for high prices.
Open source IT infrastructure is becoming available from databases to desktops. This is true competition and since Microsoft has gone over to a rental software model for businesses the costs can be directly compared to Open Source. The true test of whether Microsoft is overcharging will come in the next few years. Given the very slow take up of Open Source solutions it looks like they must be giving relatively good value. What is more worrying is whether Microsoft is contributing to the advancement of software or not. There doesnt seem to be much evidence for it if the best we can say about a new edition of the operating system is that it includes a lot of progams previously available as addons.
Intel is manifestly spending its profits on new processor technologys though the market may be maturing to the point now where the search for ever more powerfull microprocessors may be comming to an end. Simply because the majority of the market will not need anything more powerfull. The only thing I can think of which might be counted as innovative in the operating system and needing the power of a new generation of microprocessors would be speech recognition coupled with artificial intelligence. Other than that the pc has become as boring as a fridge.
Or the EU decides to modify the behaviour of the market for political reasons - for example retaining the ability to manufacture weapons.
It is true that pre-ground changes flavour as it oxidises but I dont notice much degredation over the week or so a sealed bag full lasts...
There is a difference between reducing costs by the advancement of technology and reducing costs by redistributing labour. Both are inevitable through the action of market forces but only advancing technology increases overall wealth. A printer cartridge standard qualifies as an advancement in technology.
In any case both changes should be supported by a social framework which can reuse the displaced labour through retraining. It is a similar economic question as to whether women should join the educated workforce. A state which does not take advantage of all of its available resources is less economically efficient than one which does.
Exactly, your moral judgement may say "take an eye for an eye" and you execute the hitman. But if you want to stop paid for killings you should have greater deterrent punishment for the hitmans paymaster. Its a straightforward economic question of supply and demand - what law gives you the greatest bang for your moral imperative.
I think that to be fair to Lawyers in general we should recall that many of them took up law studies because of an aptitude and interest in the interpretation and application of Law. Much as a nuclear scientist is motivated by an interest in physics and then may go on to work on weapons or medical fields.
:=)
If we choose to employ lawyers in dubious disputes it is their paymasters we should be criticising and not automatically the lawyers themselves.
At the end of the day it is the politicians job to create the framework under which the law operates and we should remind ourselves that through the operation of democracy we can change the politicians.
Of course you can argue that an individual can choose to work for different causes and that greed often motivates the choice but you can vote for social engineering through the tax system or other mechanisms.
I dont have any particular political alliegance but I have a strong suspicion that there is undue influence on the political process by pressure groups with a lot of money. Removing undue influence by money applies as much to politics as it does to lawyers.
Soviet style systems are a dead duck but I see serious cracks in the US too, however there doesnt seem to be a candidate guiding principal to improve the situation at the momment. Maybe society is so complicated now that a single guiding principal isnt enough, we could sure do with something to rally round and believe in these days. Penguin power perhaps is one of them
I fear the pot is calling the kettle black sir.
Either you negociate with China or you go to war with them, take your pick, they are your only real competitor.
Pity the article doesnt say what the failure mode actually is ... does anybody actually know.. is it water ingress, cracks or what???
You should read the British tabloid newspapers to understand what bias and spin realy mean, the BBC is still free from a politicaly biased editorial line. (At least as far as english-white-anglo-saxon-middle-class-protestant people are capable of being)
Incidentaly the appointment of Greg Dyke as Chief Executive was greeted with complaints that he was biased towards the Labour government and therefore unsuitable.
The BBC did not have a position on a political issue, what they did was to incorrectly report that the government had "sexed up" an account of Iraqs military capabilities prior to the vote on going to war. The BBC's error was in not fully investigating Gilligans assertions and then retracting his errors.
Of course you could also blame Greg Dyke for fostering a more commercial attitude amongst BBC news reporting because he felt that as demonstrated by the behavior of the sucessfull commercial "free press" this was what the public wanted to hear. To this extent you are correct, sensational journalism is part of the ratings war. However it should not be allowed to affect the standards of the BBC as a news reporting organisation. This does not affect the ability of a media organisation to broadcast speculation and contrasting opinions, so long as their provenance is clear and it is not reported as hard news.
"I might just let this virus do its work..."
I dont think anybody is seriously going to sit there with a backdoor virus on their machine. (not with the ammount of work that went into the desktop themes etc). The only people who might actually leave a virus on their machine wouldnt understand or be interested in the SCO debate.
Also whoever wrote the virus obviously doesnt realy give a monkeys about the open software movement, they just wanted to attack SCO. More likely is that the writer is a loner with no affiliations who wanted to demonstrate their cleverness. They must be pissed off that even slashdot thinks that they are an scumbag. I myself would not object strongly if the virus writer gets cancer and dies soon.
an interesting and imformative read, I vote to replace mr Evans with you.
I dont know about the new york times, but the BBC has a world wide reputation for unbiased news reporting. The fact that both the Chairman and Chief Executive both resigned because of a couple of unverifiable sentances that turned out to be wrong uttered by Andrew Gilligan tends to suggest that they take this seriously. I can assure you that your jibe will be recognised as the result of small minded childishness by most readers.