Like most highly successful public companies, Microsoft does share buybacks instead of paying out dividends, because as another poster wrote dividends are taxed twice, once when Microsoft earned the money, again when the investor receives the dividends (dividends are taxed as regular income). Thus, dividends are grossly tax inefficient, and the dividend payout rates of stocks have plummeted accordingly. Dividend paying stocks are favored by retirees who need the regular income and for use in tax-sheltered voluntary retirement accounts.
REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) are a special case, they get special tax treatment in exchange for paying out the bulk of their income in dividends.
Reprogram the Code Red carriers cable modems for, say, 1Kbps upstream bandwidth, so they can't bother the rest of us quite so easily. The cable co will still noticed the hacked modem if they're paying attention at all. Heck, cut their downstream bandwidth down to 64Kbps while you're at it, leaves more for those of us who know what we're doing.
But if corporations don't have free speech, doesn't that mean that the people who work for corporations also don't have free speech? Isn't a corporation just a collection of individuals, no matter how much the Left tries to depersonalize things?
Yes, Doom 3 could do it. Betcha it comes out right about the time people are looking for a way to justify buying nVidia's latest & greatest and AMD's shiny new ClawHammer. Surely they'll do a x86-64 compile? Millions will buy new gear to play the game in all its glory. Hooray, we are saved!...
...but then tech worker productivity will plummet for the next month, the Internet will crash from millions playing Deathmatch, the federal deficit will skyrocket, and the whole economy goes into the crapper. Damn, I knew there had to be a catch.
...they'd embrace the upcoming AMD Hammer architecture and build high-end Linux/Hammer workstations and entry- to mid-level servers around them. Kind of a Sun/Linux meets Apple deal: clean product line, not a lot of overlap, well designed, very cool. I say Linux rather than Solaris if only because it's impossible to do Solaris/x86 device drivers for everything, whereas Linux has a decent chance.
Of course, that'd freak out their SPARC people, so they'll never do it. Pity.
Take a look at the casks the waste is stored in. They can survive a direct hit from a 747 fully loaded with fuel.
The engineering problems with nuclear waste storage have been worked out. It's just a matter of dealing with the political problems associated with the word "nuclear".
So if we'd never bothered then the Soviet Union wouldn't have either? And the nuclear programs of National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan weren't a worry because...?
We rebuilt National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan into prosperous, pacifist democracies. We're working on doing that with Afghanistan. Yeah, we're awful people.
(Nazi == National Socialist Workers Party.)
The idea behind the recycling deposit for PCs...
on
Recycle Fee For Each PC?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...is to encourage manufacturers to develop PCs that can be efficiently recycled. If someone figures out how to build a PC that can be recycled for less than the deposit amount and makes a profit, cool, the system works.
Same idea behind the European car recycling deposits. It's more-or-less the same market principle behind the pollution credits program President Bush announced today, which is based on an existing successful program.
Period Ending: Dec 31, 2001 Sep 30, 2001 Jun 30, 2001 Mar 31, 2001
Income Tax Expense $1,074,000,000 $604,000,000 $33,000,000 $1,207,000,000
Its employees, of course, get reamed by the taxman just like the rest of us.
Yup. And the U.S. employees overwhelmingly live in high tax, high cost of living states, so they're really getting reamed. (Yeah, why I stayed in Michigan.)
I think I understand one thing that Bill Gates & Co. is bitter about. Microsoft and its 20,000+ employees pay $billions in taxes every year, a portion of which is used by various governments to sue Microsoft for even more money, and at the behest of their competitors (in exchange for "campaign contributions") no less!
Just to add insult to injury, they're facing one hell of a competitive threat from open source crews who are giving away software, ie, not paying taxes!
Yeah, I know, the people who use the software still chip in. But Red Hat ain't exactly coughing up $gigabucks to the taxman.
I suspect he's wondering why these Democrat AG's can't figure this out.
It's one of the things I like about open source:-).
I live in a condo complex. There are a few other large condo complexes surrounding us. We could install the gear (one-time charge), carry the entire Dish Network datastream (maybe they'd subsidize us?), maybe figure out how to retransmit the HDTV over-the-air datastreams (20Mb/sec each), have our Internet access plugged into a fractional DS3 feed, and if one of the local telecom companies wants to make use of the POTS ports to provide us with a competitor to Ameritech, that works too. If Earthlink or some other ISP wants to handle the Internet feed and customer support, groovy.
Of course, it'd be simpler to just do pure Ethernet, but it might be an easier sell to the community if we could do DBS TV too. Just plug in your satellite receiver, call Dish Network with your credit card number, and vegitate to your heart's content. Maintenance shouldn't be too big a deal.
Being fiber, extending the network to neighboring communities shouldn't be too big a deal, if this grand delusion works in the first place.
Let's face facts: someone has to build a new fiber-to-the-home network. That's going to mean starting a real company raising serious capital (the old fashioned dividend-paying stock model is appropriate here), but these half-assed measures (like DSL) just don't work well.
Put one of these in the homes. They cost well under $200 in quantity. Swap in a new box (say, Gigabit Ethernet) when it's cost-effective, but for now, 100Mbps will do. You're basically building one big honking switched Ethernet.
Lots of grunt work, but it's very doable. Call it the Internet Plumbing Company. And if someone implements HDTV over IP Multicast later on and whacks the cable TV monopolies, that's good too.
Six months ago, most Americans were stunned to discover how differently others in the world regard us from the way we see ourselves. Globalism is a major reason.
So's state-controlled media in, say, the Middle East perpetually broadcasting anti-American (and anti-Semitic) propaganda to give their captive populations an external "enemy" to blame for the misery caused by their corrupt dictatorships. Maybe pervasive Internet access would end-run this, but it hasn't done the job yet, even in a ridiculously wealthy nation like Saudi Arabian royal dictatorship.
We might do more to suggest to those captive populations that they do what Americans did over two centuries ago: overthrow their dictatorships in favor of a constitutionally limited republic. Yes, there's downside risk, but is it that much worse than the current situation?
I did that, but it's annoying. My home machine (Epox 8KHA+ KT266A chipset) with Radeon 8500 and my work machine (Epox 8KHA KT266 chipset, about to be replaced by an ASUS A7V333-R) with a Radeon VE (aka Radeon 7000 with dualhead) both lop off the lower right section of the screen on the VG191 DVI. The Sony M81 via DVI doesn't have this problem. The Sony is more polished than the VG191, but I sure do like the extra real estate of the ViewSonic.
I have a ViewSonic VG191 19" LCD and a Sony G500 21" FD Trinitron hooked up to my ATI Radeon 8500 dualhead card at home, and a Sony M81 18" LCD at work. The VG191 has *almost* as much viewable area as the G500 (remember, a 21" tube has slightly less than 20" of usable screen), and hooked up to the DVI port it's razor sharp and very easy to read at its native 1280x1024 res. The VG191 is noticibly larger than the Sony 18". Alas, ViewSonic hiked the price by $300 a few weeks ago (a few days after I bought mine, when's the last time that happened?), so you'll spend at least $1200 to get one. It comes with DVI and analog cables though, the Sony M81 only comes with an analog cable(dumb!). One irritation with the ViewSonic: text mode (BIOS startup, etc) chops off the lower right section of the screen when using the DVI port (everything's fine via analog). The KDE desktop displayed on the VG191 via DVI is unbelievably cool.
Sony's entry level 21" FD Trinitron is ~$500 (the better G520P is ~$750), so if funds are tight, hey, you won't suffer too much. I use my G500 for HDTV video more than anything else these days, which no affordable LCD can do (Apple's HD Cinema display will, but it's $3500). But given a choice, LCD via DVI is the way to go.
So if we are only produce 3 times more stuff percapita, why 8 times more polution?
Because well over 2/3rd of China's population live in the preindustrial rural territories, IIRC. They're industrializing fast, though, and they have ridiculously large quantities of coal for fuel, so I'd expect their pollution levels to rise quickly, which as another poster said is clearly happening in their urban centers.
OT: I'm getting sick of these goddamn leftists modding down my posts every time I say something politically incorrect. My post at the top of this thread has been modded down twice already. Censoring bastards.
Will the #2 pencil trick work for reconnecting the bridge? It worked on Thunderbird-core Athlons for the L1 bridges, doesn't work on Palamino-core Athlons for those bridges, but what about this bridge (L5)?
Background: L1 is cut to lock the clock multiplier. Reconnecting L1 lets you set whatever multiplier you want. Graphite from a #2 0.5mm mechanical pencil is just conductive enough to work. I did this successfully to two Athlon CPUs. They used a deeper cut on the Athlon XPs, so I decided to leave my XP 1800+ locked.
A new effort for NASA boosted by the White House is a nuclear power and propulsion initiative.
Both NASA and the DOD have each studied nuclear reactors for spacecraft power generation, the CRS report notes. Under the Bush White House, nuclear power and propulsion work is being rekindled.
"Although nuclear devices have advantages over other types of power and propulsion in terms of the amount of energy they produce versus their size and mass, some environmentalists oppose launching nuclear material into space. They worry that a launch accident, or an unintended spacecraft reentry, would spread radioactive material over Earth's population. Thus, the decision to reinvigorate NASA's program -- which would be conducted with the Department of Energy -- is expected to raise controversy," the CRS report states.
NASA work in the nuclear power arena is also being tied to outer planet exploration.
By using nuclear power and propulsion, NASA's O'Keefe has stated that spacecraft sent to such locales as Europa -- a moon of Jupiter -- and to distant Pluto, could get to those targets faster, and operate for longer periods of time.
YES! Before we can actually do a manned mission to Mars, we need a way to get there in a shorter amount of time. At least on this issue, NASA has its order-of-operations straight. When propulsion and other basic issues get nailed down (keeping the crews alive, etc), then we can make our grand plans for exploration.
DSL is a kludge, in George Gilder's words "the equivalent of the Pony Express engineering winged horses". It's time to build new fiber-to-the-home nets. Some thoughts on that:
1) Use these in the homes, assuming folks still want to use their 100BaseT copper gear. 2) One could let existing ISPs plug into the "local" net to provide "long distance" Internet service, as well as the usual email/Usenet/personal web pages and customer support. Someone like Earthlink might go for that? 2b) Or just buy the usual backbone feed from the usual suspects. 3) Free peering for local traffic with any networks you can run a cable to, like your local university. 4) Any recommendations for switches and core routers? Ought to be able to turn individual ports on and off from remote. 5) High density developments, like the condo complex I live in, seem like a good place to start. I just don't know how to run the cable with minimum mess. Anyhow, start with the easy targets to build a solid customer base, then let the neighbors beg for network extensions.
Works in theory. If I ever finish reading the obligatory O'Reilly book maybe I'll take a shot at it, but I'd rather a real network engineer did the work. I'm getting tired of waiting, though. It's not like the existing telcos are going to get a clue. 100Mbps fiber-to-the-home with 1Gbps backbone (upgrading to 10Gbps when the gear is ready and semi-economical) seems very doable, just a lot of grunt work.
Also seems like IP multicast would be a neat distribution means for 20Mbps HDTV datastreams, but that can wait.
Most people don't need $40K+ SUVs and what not, but they're fun. (Well, they look fun, I drive an old Buick and spend my money on technotoys...) Compared to the cost of one of those, what's $1K-$2K every year or two for a state-of-the-art PC? (Monitor extra, natch.)
Which is AMDs contribution: bringing the price of heavy desktop computing firepower down to "Why not?" prices. And my HDTV PCI card chews serious CPU time, so having several hundred MHz to spare is rather nice.
On investing in AMD stock: speaking as a 2+ year AMD shareholder, if you buy in, prepare yourself to be in it for the longhaul and for the insane price swings. AMD is one of the most manipulated stocks on the market. It's insanely undervalued right now, but there's absolutely no way to tell when its valuation will reflect reality.
Maybe the Hammers will do the trick. At the least they'll beat the crap out of those souped-up P4s Intel let Tom play with:-).
The huge die size of the Itanium and its upcoming successor make the chip far more expensive than the Pentium series, so I would not expect Itanium machines for $2K. So far, the CPUs alone are several $thousand. I also haven't seen where its performence is that impressive. x86 code performence, since its emulated, is poor. Recompile or else. Intel has sold, what 500 Itanium CPUs?
The upcoming AMD Hammer series, OTOH, is supposed to be about 30% faster clock-to-clock than the current Athlon XP series (which is considerably faster clock-to-clock than the Intel P4) and start at 2GHz. Sun's recent announcement of Linux x86 platform support, with details to come midyear, suggests that they'll be moving to the Hammer (to ship Q4). Sun would certainly love to take a swipe at Intel, and Sun has made positive comments about AMD's x86-64 Hammer architecture.
Speculation: Intel gets Hammered in the second half of this year.
AccessDTV makes a PCI HDTV card that can record the 20Mbps HDTV datastream to your hard drive. I have one. Very, very nice with my Sony G500 21" FD Trinitron monitor (wish I could justify one of those 24" widescreen models). Windows only, and a GHz-class PC is recommended (excellent on my WinXP Athlon XP 1800+ machine).
It's lousy for analog TV, won't record analog at all and I never did get audio working for analog, but it's the card to get for digital TV.
Line of sight is going to become really, really important in the battlefield. High-flying non-stealth aircraft would be in serious trouble if accurate enough fire-control systems for ground anti-aircraft lasers could be developed. Armored ground forces would regain importance. The derided Crusader artillery system could suddenly look prescient (antiaircraft suppression being one of its combat roles), assuming tracking lots of artillery shells is more difficult than tracking aircraft. F-117's ought to remain effective, but I still think it's dangerous to become overreliant on air power.
The new Spectre's might not work against ICBMs, but what about shorter range ballistic missiles, like the several hundred missiles China has pointed at Taiwan? (Yeah, why China's bitchy about America dumping the ABM treaty with that nation that no longer exists...)
Nice coincidence that it takes a free nation with a free-market economy to finance a proper high-tech military, long-term at least. Hopefully no one will figure out how to dump the "free nation" half of the equation.
Slashdot Mirror
Like most highly successful public companies, Microsoft does share buybacks instead of paying out dividends, because as another poster wrote dividends are taxed twice, once when Microsoft earned the money, again when the investor receives the dividends (dividends are taxed as regular income). Thus, dividends are grossly tax inefficient, and the dividend payout rates of stocks have plummeted accordingly. Dividend paying stocks are favored by retirees who need the regular income and for use in tax-sheltered voluntary retirement accounts.
REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) are a special case, they get special tax treatment in exchange for paying out the bulk of their income in dividends.
Reprogram the Code Red carriers cable modems for, say, 1Kbps upstream bandwidth, so they can't bother the rest of us quite so easily. The cable co will still noticed the hacked modem if they're paying attention at all. Heck, cut their downstream bandwidth down to 64Kbps while you're at it, leaves more for those of us who know what we're doing.
But if corporations don't have free speech, doesn't that mean that the people who work for corporations also don't have free speech? Isn't a corporation just a collection of individuals, no matter how much the Left tries to depersonalize things?
Yes, Doom 3 could do it. Betcha it comes out right about the time people are looking for a way to justify buying nVidia's latest & greatest and AMD's shiny new ClawHammer. Surely they'll do a x86-64 compile? Millions will buy new gear to play the game in all its glory. Hooray, we are saved!...
...but then tech worker productivity will plummet for the next month, the Internet will crash from millions playing Deathmatch, the federal deficit will skyrocket, and the whole economy goes into the crapper. Damn, I knew there had to be a catch.
Screw it. Pass the railgun, lock & load.
...they'd embrace the upcoming AMD Hammer architecture and build high-end Linux/Hammer workstations and entry- to mid-level servers around them. Kind of a Sun/Linux meets Apple deal: clean product line, not a lot of overlap, well designed, very cool. I say Linux rather than Solaris if only because it's impossible to do Solaris/x86 device drivers for everything, whereas Linux has a decent chance.
Of course, that'd freak out their SPARC people, so they'll never do it. Pity.
Take a look at the casks the waste is stored in. They can survive a direct hit from a 747 fully loaded with fuel.
The engineering problems with nuclear waste storage have been worked out. It's just a matter of dealing with the political problems associated with the word "nuclear".
So if we'd never bothered then the Soviet Union wouldn't have either? And the nuclear programs of National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan weren't a worry because...?
We rebuilt National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan into prosperous, pacifist democracies. We're working on doing that with Afghanistan. Yeah, we're awful people.
(Nazi == National Socialist Workers Party.)
...is to encourage manufacturers to develop PCs that can be efficiently recycled. If someone figures out how to build a PC that can be recycled for less than the deposit amount and makes a profit, cool, the system works.
Same idea behind the European car recycling deposits. It's more-or-less the same market principle behind the pollution credits program President Bush announced today, which is based on an existing successful program.
Microsoft hasn't paid taxes for years. Look it up.
OK, I looked it up:
Period Ending: Dec 31, 2001 Sep 30, 2001 Jun 30, 2001 Mar 31, 2001
Income Tax Expense $1,074,000,000 $604,000,000 $33,000,000 $1,207,000,000
Its employees, of course, get reamed by the taxman just like the rest of us.
Yup. And the U.S. employees overwhelmingly live in high tax, high cost of living states, so they're really getting reamed. (Yeah, why I stayed in Michigan.)
I think I understand one thing that Bill Gates & Co. is bitter about. Microsoft and its 20,000+ employees pay $billions in taxes every year, a portion of which is used by various governments to sue Microsoft for even more money, and at the behest of their competitors (in exchange for "campaign contributions") no less!
:-).
Just to add insult to injury, they're facing one hell of a competitive threat from open source crews who are giving away software, ie, not paying taxes!
Yeah, I know, the people who use the software still chip in. But Red Hat ain't exactly coughing up $gigabucks to the taxman.
I suspect he's wondering why these Democrat AG's can't figure this out.
It's one of the things I like about open source
I live in a condo complex. There are a few other large condo complexes surrounding us. We could install the gear (one-time charge), carry the entire Dish Network datastream (maybe they'd subsidize us?), maybe figure out how to retransmit the HDTV over-the-air datastreams (20Mb/sec each), have our Internet access plugged into a fractional DS3 feed, and if one of the local telecom companies wants to make use of the POTS ports to provide us with a competitor to Ameritech, that works too. If Earthlink or some other ISP wants to handle the Internet feed and customer support, groovy.
Of course, it'd be simpler to just do pure Ethernet, but it might be an easier sell to the community if we could do DBS TV too. Just plug in your satellite receiver, call Dish Network with your credit card number, and vegitate to your heart's content. Maintenance shouldn't be too big a deal.
Being fiber, extending the network to neighboring communities shouldn't be too big a deal, if this grand delusion works in the first place.
See here. 256meg PC2100 DIMMs back down to $70 apiece. Kudos to amdmb.com for the heads-up.
Let's face facts: someone has to build a new fiber-to-the-home network. That's going to mean starting a real company raising serious capital (the old fashioned dividend-paying stock model is appropriate here), but these half-assed measures (like DSL) just don't work well.
Put one of these in the homes. They cost well under $200 in quantity. Swap in a new box (say, Gigabit Ethernet) when it's cost-effective, but for now, 100Mbps will do. You're basically building one big honking switched Ethernet.
Lots of grunt work, but it's very doable. Call it the Internet Plumbing Company. And if someone implements HDTV over IP Multicast later on and whacks the cable TV monopolies, that's good too.
Six months ago, most Americans were stunned to discover how differently others in the world regard us from the way we see ourselves. Globalism is a major reason.
So's state-controlled media in, say, the Middle East perpetually broadcasting anti-American (and anti-Semitic) propaganda to give their captive populations an external "enemy" to blame for the misery caused by their corrupt dictatorships. Maybe pervasive Internet access would end-run this, but it hasn't done the job yet, even in a ridiculously wealthy nation like Saudi Arabian royal dictatorship.
We might do more to suggest to those captive populations that they do what Americans did over two centuries ago: overthrow their dictatorships in favor of a constitutionally limited republic. Yes, there's downside risk, but is it that much worse than the current situation?
I did that, but it's annoying. My home machine (Epox 8KHA+ KT266A chipset) with Radeon 8500 and my work machine (Epox 8KHA KT266 chipset, about to be replaced by an ASUS A7V333-R) with a Radeon VE (aka Radeon 7000 with dualhead) both lop off the lower right section of the screen on the VG191 DVI. The Sony M81 via DVI doesn't have this problem. The Sony is more polished than the VG191, but I sure do like the extra real estate of the ViewSonic.
I have a ViewSonic VG191 19" LCD and a Sony G500 21" FD Trinitron hooked up to my ATI Radeon 8500 dualhead card at home, and a Sony M81 18" LCD at work. The VG191 has *almost* as much viewable area as the G500 (remember, a 21" tube has slightly less than 20" of usable screen), and hooked up to the DVI port it's razor sharp and very easy to read at its native 1280x1024 res. The VG191 is noticibly larger than the Sony 18". Alas, ViewSonic hiked the price by $300 a few weeks ago (a few days after I bought mine, when's the last time that happened?), so you'll spend at least $1200 to get one. It comes with DVI and analog cables though, the Sony M81 only comes with an analog cable(dumb!). One irritation with the ViewSonic: text mode (BIOS startup, etc) chops off the lower right section of the screen when using the DVI port (everything's fine via analog). The KDE desktop displayed on the VG191 via DVI is unbelievably cool.
Sony's entry level 21" FD Trinitron is ~$500 (the better G520P is ~$750), so if funds are tight, hey, you won't suffer too much. I use my G500 for HDTV video more than anything else these days, which no affordable LCD can do (Apple's HD Cinema display will, but it's $3500). But given a choice, LCD via DVI is the way to go.
So if we are only produce 3 times more stuff percapita, why 8 times more polution?
Because well over 2/3rd of China's population live in the preindustrial rural territories, IIRC. They're industrializing fast, though, and they have ridiculously large quantities of coal for fuel, so I'd expect their pollution levels to rise quickly, which as another poster said is clearly happening in their urban centers.
OT: I'm getting sick of these goddamn leftists modding down my posts every time I say something politically incorrect. My post at the top of this thread has been modded down twice already. Censoring bastards.
...the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have exempted China, India, Brazil, and every other third world nation with major and growing pollution problems.
And there wouldn't be so much technophobic fear of nuclear power, which is our best shot at non-atmospheric-polluting power generation by far.
Will the #2 pencil trick work for reconnecting the bridge? It worked on Thunderbird-core Athlons for the L1 bridges, doesn't work on Palamino-core Athlons for those bridges, but what about this bridge (L5)?
Background: L1 is cut to lock the clock multiplier. Reconnecting L1 lets you set whatever multiplier you want. Graphite from a #2 0.5mm mechanical pencil is just conductive enough to work. I did this successfully to two Athlon CPUs. They used a deeper cut on the Athlon XPs, so I decided to leave my XP 1800+ locked.
NASA goes nuclear
A new effort for NASA boosted by the White House is a nuclear power and propulsion initiative.
Both NASA and the DOD have each studied nuclear reactors for spacecraft power generation, the CRS report notes. Under the Bush White House, nuclear power and propulsion work is being rekindled.
"Although nuclear devices have advantages over other types of power and propulsion in terms of the amount of energy they produce versus their size and mass, some environmentalists oppose launching nuclear material into space. They worry that a launch accident, or an unintended spacecraft reentry, would spread radioactive material over Earth's population. Thus, the decision to reinvigorate NASA's program -- which would be conducted with the Department of Energy -- is expected to raise controversy," the CRS report states.
NASA work in the nuclear power arena is also being tied to outer planet exploration.
By using nuclear power and propulsion, NASA's O'Keefe has stated that spacecraft sent to such locales as Europa -- a moon of Jupiter -- and to distant Pluto, could get to those targets faster, and operate for longer periods of time.
YES! Before we can actually do a manned mission to Mars, we need a way to get there in a shorter amount of time. At least on this issue, NASA has its order-of-operations straight. When propulsion and other basic issues get nailed down (keeping the crews alive, etc), then we can make our grand plans for exploration.
DSL is a kludge, in George Gilder's words "the equivalent of the Pony Express engineering winged horses". It's time to build new fiber-to-the-home nets. Some thoughts on that:
1) Use these in the homes, assuming folks still want to use their 100BaseT copper gear.
2) One could let existing ISPs plug into the "local" net to provide "long distance" Internet service, as well as the usual email/Usenet/personal web pages and customer support. Someone like Earthlink might go for that?
2b) Or just buy the usual backbone feed from the usual suspects.
3) Free peering for local traffic with any networks you can run a cable to, like your local university.
4) Any recommendations for switches and core routers? Ought to be able to turn individual ports on and off from remote.
5) High density developments, like the condo complex I live in, seem like a good place to start. I just don't know how to run the cable with minimum mess. Anyhow, start with the easy targets to build a solid customer base, then let the neighbors beg for network extensions.
Works in theory. If I ever finish reading the obligatory O'Reilly book maybe I'll take a shot at it, but I'd rather a real network engineer did the work. I'm getting tired of waiting, though. It's not like the existing telcos are going to get a clue. 100Mbps fiber-to-the-home with 1Gbps backbone (upgrading to 10Gbps when the gear is ready and semi-economical) seems very doable, just a lot of grunt work.
Also seems like IP multicast would be a neat distribution means for 20Mbps HDTV datastreams, but that can wait.
Most people don't need $40K+ SUVs and what not, but they're fun. (Well, they look fun, I drive an old Buick and spend my money on technotoys...) Compared to the cost of one of those, what's $1K-$2K every year or two for a state-of-the-art PC? (Monitor extra, natch.)
:-).
Which is AMDs contribution: bringing the price of heavy desktop computing firepower down to "Why not?" prices. And my HDTV PCI card chews serious CPU time, so having several hundred MHz to spare is rather nice.
On investing in AMD stock: speaking as a 2+ year AMD shareholder, if you buy in, prepare yourself to be in it for the longhaul and for the insane price swings. AMD is one of the most manipulated stocks on the market. It's insanely undervalued right now, but there's absolutely no way to tell when its valuation will reflect reality.
Maybe the Hammers will do the trick. At the least they'll beat the crap out of those souped-up P4s Intel let Tom play with
The huge die size of the Itanium and its upcoming successor make the chip far more expensive than the Pentium series, so I would not expect Itanium machines for $2K. So far, the CPUs alone are several $thousand. I also haven't seen where its performence is that impressive. x86 code performence, since its emulated, is poor. Recompile or else. Intel has sold, what 500 Itanium CPUs?
The upcoming AMD Hammer series, OTOH, is supposed to be about 30% faster clock-to-clock than the current Athlon XP series (which is considerably faster clock-to-clock than the Intel P4) and start at 2GHz. Sun's recent announcement of Linux x86 platform support, with details to come midyear, suggests that they'll be moving to the Hammer (to ship Q4). Sun would certainly love to take a swipe at Intel, and Sun has made positive comments about AMD's x86-64 Hammer architecture.
Speculation: Intel gets Hammered in the second half of this year.
AccessDTV makes a PCI HDTV card that can record the 20Mbps HDTV datastream to your hard drive. I have one. Very, very nice with my Sony G500 21" FD Trinitron monitor (wish I could justify one of those 24" widescreen models). Windows only, and a GHz-class PC is recommended (excellent on my WinXP Athlon XP 1800+ machine).
It's lousy for analog TV, won't record analog at all and I never did get audio working for analog, but it's the card to get for digital TV.
Line of sight is going to become really, really important in the battlefield. High-flying non-stealth aircraft would be in serious trouble if accurate enough fire-control systems for ground anti-aircraft lasers could be developed. Armored ground forces would regain importance. The derided Crusader artillery system could suddenly look prescient (antiaircraft suppression being one of its combat roles), assuming tracking lots of artillery shells is more difficult than tracking aircraft. F-117's ought to remain effective, but I still think it's dangerous to become overreliant on air power.
The new Spectre's might not work against ICBMs, but what about shorter range ballistic missiles, like the several hundred missiles China has pointed at Taiwan? (Yeah, why China's bitchy about America dumping the ABM treaty with that nation that no longer exists...)
Nice coincidence that it takes a free nation with a free-market economy to finance a proper high-tech military, long-term at least. Hopefully no one will figure out how to dump the "free nation" half of the equation.