The problem is, Intel is way ahead on their 45nm manufacturing process, which could virtually negate AMD's 65nm step. (Intel says they're going to be ready in 2007, which is when everyone expects the new AMD 65nm fab to come online).
If Intel could get to 45nm before AMD even gets to 65nm, you could kiss any performance gain that 65nm would lend AMD totally goodbye. (There's no telling how likely it is that this could happen, but seeing as both Intel and AMD are putting a great deal of their resources into it, it's anyones guess).
Take a look at Google Calendar;). Short of PDA sync, it's got everything you're looking for (and is helping pave a way towards CalDAV becoming the acceptible calendaring standard).
It's probably not up to snuff for you quite yet (as it was just released, and is technically still a beta), but given some time and some feature growth and likely Mail (OS X) won't be the only application Google has replaced for me.
If you have a Gmail account, go into your Calendar (if you have it), and under the "Calendars" box, you should see a link that says "Other Calendars +". Click it. You now should have the option of adding Public Calendars, Friends Calendars/events, Holiday Calendars, etc, right in front of you, with the same ease of use as Gmail.
Oh, and if you're an iCal user (or for that matter, use iCalendar as a format either with any of the Mozilla Calendaring project components, or anything compatible), you can upload/migrate/do everything you should be expected to be able to do with different calendaring apps sharing a standard. (And yes, that DOES include adding Friend's Public Calendars/Events through whitelisting by Email address).
Oh Please, the inverse is true; the Drug Companies are some of the largest politically charged industries in current existance, and as a result, a lot of drugs that shouldn't be on the market get there (COX2 Inhibiting NSAIDs are virtually unilaterally linked to heart problems, and yet many are still on the market, and still cost a fortune).
On the other hand, pot is cheap, it's easily home grown, and some studies have shown it does more damage to your lungs than smoking a pack of cigarrettes. And since there really isn't a political lobbying force trying to get this "much needed pharmacutical" on the market legally... Hell, even with some doctors pushing its obvious medical uses, it's still been a tough sell.
Think about Opiods. Then think about how much money has been made using synthetic opiates. The fact remains, the market for synthetic drugs is much greater than the market for naturally occuring drugs due to the corporate and political climates in this country, and because it's easy to convince people with vague symptoms that they have some disease and need a medicine to treat it.
"(1) College students would find a way to make it in Chem lab. "
Considering it will require at least 3 named psycho-active drugs, in delicate balance, I doubt it's going to be easy for a student, or a drug company, to just cook up in a lab.
(2) If it was available by perscription only, there would be a person who would act as a source on campus just for the sheer profit of it.
Sure thing, but as soon as one of them dies a horrible death from the side effects of the medicines involved, hopefully they'll learn their lesson and switch back to the sub-$100 dollar, relatively safer version of alcohol readily available on the market, and much easier to obtain (and make in a chem-lab, or purchase from a chemical supplier, or make yourself with yeast.. you get the idea).
Wow, I'm glad those drug companies aren't making a shitton of money on drugs that we don't need like anti-psychotics and anti-depressants, because the way you make it sound, the government would _never_ let those drugs come to market.
Oh wait, aren't those the two drugs with the highest market value outside of painkillers (opioids or NSAIDs)? Believe it or not, there is a market for this stuff, as a huge percentage of this country suffers from alcoholism, and a lot of people that are a year away from needing a liver transplant could be helped down from the habit early enough to keep them from needing invasive surgery and a lifetime of anti-rejection drugs.
Of course, this stuff's still going to be hella expensive (due to the number of psycho-active drugs neccesary, and because of the amount of testing it will require), and doubtful the FDA would EVER consider it for OTC usage..
Luckily in life there's a whole class of people called "Alcoholics", who often would like to quit alcohol due to the cirrosis it's likely causing to their livers. An "Alcohol Substitute" would be like a nicotine patch for a smoker, or methadone to a heroin addict.
(It's likely to be so expensive that otherwise, nobody would consider it anyways, thanks to the delicate balance of drugs required to make this stuff work. Not to mention possible side-effects...)
It's likely with the complexity and the number of drugs required to pull off this "synthetic alcohol", that not only would it be outside of the budget of most college students, it would probably also be only available by prescription only, and only for use for extreme alcholics who cannot function in ordinary life (since as any addict can tell you, quitting cold turkey is tough, and has a high failure rate).
I believe that AMD had this technology [wikipedia.org] before Intel ever started in on it.
No offense, but you lost me right about here. The Athlon 64 and Opteron (and the Clawhammer/Sledgehammer chips as a whole) are fundamentally a whole different direction than the Core Duo. While they're aiming towards the same goals (really damned fast x86 code execution), they get there in two entirely different ways.
The idea behind the Athlon 64 and Opteron chips were to attack Intel where it would hurt them most, the midrange server section of their business. AMD realized that Intel sells more of these machines, and the maintainance contracts on these machines mean that they're going to keep coming back to you for more of them, even 5 years down the line when your chips are virtually "obsolete". This is broadcasted very loudly in their choice to integrate a memory controller onboard their CPUs; in order to upgrade chips with an integrated memory controller, you have to replace the whole board, and managers aren't going to want to do that very often. Your chips are cheaper overall (because they don't have to have external logic to drive the memory controller anymore, and they were cheaper to begin with), but it locks you into AMD as a company, and locks you into that chip (a slam dunk victory for AMD).
The Intel Core philiosophy was something completely different; it was reactionary in the sense that the Pentium 4 and Netburst were sputtering to the end of their performance gains, way earlier than Intel could have prediticted. But at the same time, Intel has always been known to make great mobile chips, and the Intel Core Architecture was built on a mobile chip platform. It was the logical choice, even in March 2003 when the Pentium M/Core Architecture first made itself available to the world as Banias. The Athlon 64 didn't even make itself available on the market until April (Opteron) or September (Athlon 64) of that year.
Better late than never? Yeah, of course. But the point is, the Opteron was meant to be a server chip and take back the market from Intel and is completely succeeding. The Core chips were entirely meant to be Mobile chips, and due to technology trickledown, we're starting to see that Mobile chips are just as much at home in desktop computers.
And, I know you werent' trying to make yourself out to be a complete and total AMD fanboy in your post, you entirely came off that way, especially without knowledge of the product itself. I don't care particularly for either company, just the fastest chips I can possibly get my hands on, and right now that's the Athlon FX, but in a few months that's going to be Conroe.
Good think Intel invented the Core chips. Because you know, using 40% of the power of a Pentium 4 and doing 40% more work while clocking nearly twice as slow isn't a radical change or anything.
Preliminary reports even say the Core chips are up to 35% faster than the AMD64 chips, and they don't even have EM64T to fall back on. But, for the purposes of this discussion, since this is a Pentium 4, it is still quite the power hog, but they've made advances with this chip that do warrant some attention (take a look at the benchmarks), and with their new $50 water cooler and overclocking, the Pentium 4 once again takes the performance crown.
I'm all for AMD, but Intel has cleaned up their act too, and refusing to notice that is a fatal mistake, no matter how much Slashdot/AMD coolaid you've consumed.
This is still the Pentium 4; they're not dropping the Pentium Name on a chip that's still a Pentium, which they're still selling and still are going to sell for about another year until the Core chips take over the market. It's called "Phasing Out" a product in marketing speak.
I know that Slashdot coolaid prohibits me from talking bad about AMD, but if you insist to indict Intel for folding to the RI/MPAA, I've got to do my job and inform you that AMD has done the same. Their technology is called "Live!" (oddly enough, named exactly the same way Microsoft is naming their new services, just like the Athlon XP was named just like Windows XP. Hmmm.)
Trusted computing is bad, but running from companies who are shipping Trusted components is like running from air. You just can't do it in the current environment. If you don't like it, talk to Hollywood, the processor companies are just trying to do their jobs and still sell hardware. If Intel sold DRM'd boxes and AMD refused to, Hollywood would crucify AMD. Visa versa for Intel, even more so. End result? User loses. We should be standing up to Hollywood, and not hoping the companies we buy from do the work for us.
"Microsoft alreadly licenses its DRM to anyone that wants to use it "
That has absolutely no weight in this case; the law says that all media has to be allowed to be format-shifted at the user's will. This means DRM as a whole is defeated, not Microsoft's or Apple's specific DRM system.
In fact, they could have simply left iTunes out of the whole article and it would have been more accurate. However, since iTunes would be the most heavily affected (as it's the largest music store), and because any mention of Apple products drives the media to frenzy/sensationalism.. well, you can figure out the rest.
I think in most countries, that would/should be regarded a very direct violation of consumers' rights. In Australia, you are supposed to get the product you paid for, not something different. By changing how you can "use" each song, Apple have essentially switched the product that people have.
How is this any different than shipping an Operating System and then changing the licensing? How is it any different than shipping a program, then shipping an update that adds/removes functionality?
While it's good to question DRM as a whole, media needs to be held to the same standard as other digital goods (software).
While you make an elegant argument, you forget that AT&T will control a significant portion of the DSL market, which would allow AT&T to set forth the same anti-trust/anti-competitive behavior (by filtering VoIP data).
Not to mention AT&T would then have control of the bigger half of cellular customers in America (Cingular/AT&T Wireless). The last step would be their re-acquisition of Verizon (which would be epic at this point, as Verizon just acquired MCI, which was one of the companies AT&T flagged as a "competitor" in their earlier anti-trust proceedings).
So as a consumer, I can see this leading down a very dark road for consumers.
Gaim is not really a good example because its namesake and main functionality (gAIM), piggybacks on the AOL Instant Messanger server network. I do agree that Jabber functionality embedded in Gaim could be a good example, however, for the majority of users using Gaim, Jabber isn't a priority.
A better example could be Apache and the Apache Foundation (but they get a lot of money from people), and the absolute best example I can think of are Seamonkey and Firefox from Mozilla. None of these products are directly sponsored, though they do get money from bigger organizations to recoup costs of things like bandwidth, though BitTorrent could be used to significantly offset a lot of that (which is another good example).
So what have we learned? Corporate sponsorship happens because people need money to get things done. Most organizations don't care where the money is coming from, just that they're getting it. And I think at the heart of things, that's what Larry Ellison is trying to say.
It's also worthwhile to note how this thing stacks up to its "competitor", the iPod nano.
Dimensions:
Samsung's Z5: 1.66" x.45" x 3.54, 1.8" LCD, 35 Hr Battery Life
iPod Nano: 1.6" x 0.27" x 3.5, 1.5" LCD, ~14 Hr Battery Life
Take two Nanos, stack one on top of another and you get a realization of how thick this thing is. But, with that extra thickness you pick up twice as much battery life (that should be a no brainer, seeing as doubling the size would double the available room to stash a battery). The screen is larger, but only marginally, and from the pictures it's at a strange aspect ratio (like that of a Cellphone) compared to the Nano's more naturally shaped screen (4x3?). Also worthy to note that the interface is going to be strikingly different, and that the Nano has Apple's FairPlay DRM vs. Microsoft's WMP10-DRM and some other DRM system called "Janus" (according to its product spec sheet). The Samsung unit will only ship with DRM compatibility for Windows (Media Player 10, sorry Mac users), and the unit comes in Black and Silver.
My opinion? It looks like a cellphone and an MP3 player got in a fight and the cellphone lost in a serious way. It's not particularly attractive looking with it's goofy offsized display, and the interface is questionable to say the least (the touchpad's square shape alone leaves one to question). It'll be interesting to see what impact, if any, it will have on the market.
Slashdot Mirror
That joke seems oddly.. familiar
The problem is, Intel is way ahead on their 45nm manufacturing process, which could virtually negate AMD's 65nm step. (Intel says they're going to be ready in 2007, which is when everyone expects the new AMD 65nm fab to come online).
If Intel could get to 45nm before AMD even gets to 65nm, you could kiss any performance gain that 65nm would lend AMD totally goodbye. (There's no telling how likely it is that this could happen, but seeing as both Intel and AMD are putting a great deal of their resources into it, it's anyones guess).
Take a look at Google Calendar ;). Short of PDA sync, it's got everything you're looking for (and is helping pave a way towards CalDAV becoming the acceptible calendaring standard).
It's probably not up to snuff for you quite yet (as it was just released, and is technically still a beta), but given some time and some feature growth and likely Mail (OS X) won't be the only application Google has replaced for me.
If you have a Gmail account, go into your Calendar (if you have it), and under the "Calendars" box, you should see a link that says "Other Calendars +". Click it. You now should have the option of adding Public Calendars, Friends Calendars/events, Holiday Calendars, etc, right in front of you, with the same ease of use as Gmail.
Oh, and if you're an iCal user (or for that matter, use iCalendar as a format either with any of the Mozilla Calendaring project components, or anything compatible), you can upload/migrate/do everything you should be expected to be able to do with different calendaring apps sharing a standard. (And yes, that DOES include adding Friend's Public Calendars/Events through whitelisting by Email address).
Luckily, the iCal standard was built in, and is completely compatible with, Google Calendar.
And frankly, Google's implementation's a bit more useful when you don't have your own computer with you, let alone a Mac.
Oh Please, the inverse is true; the Drug Companies are some of the largest politically charged industries in current existance, and as a result, a lot of drugs that shouldn't be on the market get there (COX2 Inhibiting NSAIDs are virtually unilaterally linked to heart problems, and yet many are still on the market, and still cost a fortune).
On the other hand, pot is cheap, it's easily home grown, and some studies have shown it does more damage to your lungs than smoking a pack of cigarrettes. And since there really isn't a political lobbying force trying to get this "much needed pharmacutical" on the market legally... Hell, even with some doctors pushing its obvious medical uses, it's still been a tough sell.
Think about Opiods. Then think about how much money has been made using synthetic opiates. The fact remains, the market for synthetic drugs is much greater than the market for naturally occuring drugs due to the corporate and political climates in this country, and because it's easy to convince people with vague symptoms that they have some disease and need a medicine to treat it.
"(1) College students would find a way to make it in Chem lab. "
Considering it will require at least 3 named psycho-active drugs, in delicate balance, I doubt it's going to be easy for a student, or a drug company, to just cook up in a lab.
(2) If it was available by perscription only, there would be a person who would act as a source on campus just for the sheer profit of it.
Sure thing, but as soon as one of them dies a horrible death from the side effects of the medicines involved, hopefully they'll learn their lesson and switch back to the sub-$100 dollar, relatively safer version of alcohol readily available on the market, and much easier to obtain (and make in a chem-lab, or purchase from a chemical supplier, or make yourself with yeast.. you get the idea).
Wow, I'm glad those drug companies aren't making a shitton of money on drugs that we don't need like anti-psychotics and anti-depressants, because the way you make it sound, the government would _never_ let those drugs come to market.
Oh wait, aren't those the two drugs with the highest market value outside of painkillers (opioids or NSAIDs)? Believe it or not, there is a market for this stuff, as a huge percentage of this country suffers from alcoholism, and a lot of people that are a year away from needing a liver transplant could be helped down from the habit early enough to keep them from needing invasive surgery and a lifetime of anti-rejection drugs.
Of course, this stuff's still going to be hella expensive (due to the number of psycho-active drugs neccesary, and because of the amount of testing it will require), and doubtful the FDA would EVER consider it for OTC usage..
Luckily in life there's a whole class of people called "Alcoholics", who often would like to quit alcohol due to the cirrosis it's likely causing to their livers. An "Alcohol Substitute" would be like a nicotine patch for a smoker, or methadone to a heroin addict.
(It's likely to be so expensive that otherwise, nobody would consider it anyways, thanks to the delicate balance of drugs required to make this stuff work. Not to mention possible side-effects...)
It's likely with the complexity and the number of drugs required to pull off this "synthetic alcohol", that not only would it be outside of the budget of most college students, it would probably also be only available by prescription only, and only for use for extreme alcholics who cannot function in ordinary life (since as any addict can tell you, quitting cold turkey is tough, and has a high failure rate).
Just wait until it hits digg.
I believe that AMD had this technology [wikipedia.org] before Intel ever started in on it.
No offense, but you lost me right about here. The Athlon 64 and Opteron (and the Clawhammer/Sledgehammer chips as a whole) are fundamentally a whole different direction than the Core Duo. While they're aiming towards the same goals (really damned fast x86 code execution), they get there in two entirely different ways.
The idea behind the Athlon 64 and Opteron chips were to attack Intel where it would hurt them most, the midrange server section of their business. AMD realized that Intel sells more of these machines, and the maintainance contracts on these machines mean that they're going to keep coming back to you for more of them, even 5 years down the line when your chips are virtually "obsolete". This is broadcasted very loudly in their choice to integrate a memory controller onboard their CPUs; in order to upgrade chips with an integrated memory controller, you have to replace the whole board, and managers aren't going to want to do that very often. Your chips are cheaper overall (because they don't have to have external logic to drive the memory controller anymore, and they were cheaper to begin with), but it locks you into AMD as a company, and locks you into that chip (a slam dunk victory for AMD).
The Intel Core philiosophy was something completely different; it was reactionary in the sense that the Pentium 4 and Netburst were sputtering to the end of their performance gains, way earlier than Intel could have prediticted. But at the same time, Intel has always been known to make great mobile chips, and the Intel Core Architecture was built on a mobile chip platform. It was the logical choice, even in March 2003 when the Pentium M/Core Architecture first made itself available to the world as Banias. The Athlon 64 didn't even make itself available on the market until April (Opteron) or September (Athlon 64) of that year.
Better late than never? Yeah, of course. But the point is, the Opteron was meant to be a server chip and take back the market from Intel and is completely succeeding. The Core chips were entirely meant to be Mobile chips, and due to technology trickledown, we're starting to see that Mobile chips are just as much at home in desktop computers.
And, I know you werent' trying to make yourself out to be a complete and total AMD fanboy in your post, you entirely came off that way, especially without knowledge of the product itself. I don't care particularly for either company, just the fastest chips I can possibly get my hands on, and right now that's the Athlon FX, but in a few months that's going to be Conroe.
Is that the number of Special Effects used in their marketing campaign?
Seriously, I know you're just trying to be funny, but both processor companies are known for giving their processors ridiculous arbitrary names.
Good think Intel invented the Core chips. Because you know, using 40% of the power of a Pentium 4 and doing 40% more work while clocking nearly twice as slow isn't a radical change or anything.
Preliminary reports even say the Core chips are up to 35% faster than the AMD64 chips, and they don't even have EM64T to fall back on. But, for the purposes of this discussion, since this is a Pentium 4, it is still quite the power hog, but they've made advances with this chip that do warrant some attention (take a look at the benchmarks), and with their new $50 water cooler and overclocking, the Pentium 4 once again takes the performance crown.
I'm all for AMD, but Intel has cleaned up their act too, and refusing to notice that is a fatal mistake, no matter how much Slashdot/AMD coolaid you've consumed.
This is still the Pentium 4; they're not dropping the Pentium Name on a chip that's still a Pentium, which they're still selling and still are going to sell for about another year until the Core chips take over the market. It's called "Phasing Out" a product in marketing speak.
You forgot Farscape.
...Odd they all have F at the beginning.. hrmm..
Today, AMD (but they are/will follow suit)
I know that Slashdot coolaid prohibits me from talking bad about AMD, but if you insist to indict Intel for folding to the RI/MPAA, I've got to do my job and inform you that AMD has done the same. Their technology is called "Live!" (oddly enough, named exactly the same way Microsoft is naming their new services, just like the Athlon XP was named just like Windows XP. Hmmm.)
Trusted computing is bad, but running from companies who are shipping Trusted components is like running from air. You just can't do it in the current environment. If you don't like it, talk to Hollywood, the processor companies are just trying to do their jobs and still sell hardware. If Intel sold DRM'd boxes and AMD refused to, Hollywood would crucify AMD. Visa versa for Intel, even more so. End result? User loses. We should be standing up to Hollywood, and not hoping the companies we buy from do the work for us.
"Microsoft alreadly licenses its DRM to anyone that wants to use it "
That has absolutely no weight in this case; the law says that all media has to be allowed to be format-shifted at the user's will. This means DRM as a whole is defeated, not Microsoft's or Apple's specific DRM system.
In fact, they could have simply left iTunes out of the whole article and it would have been more accurate. However, since iTunes would be the most heavily affected (as it's the largest music store), and because any mention of Apple products drives the media to frenzy/sensationalism.. well, you can figure out the rest.
I think in most countries, that would/should be regarded a very direct violation of consumers' rights. In Australia, you are supposed to get the product you paid for, not something different. By changing how you can "use" each song, Apple have essentially switched the product that people have.
How is this any different than shipping an Operating System and then changing the licensing? How is it any different than shipping a program, then shipping an update that adds/removes functionality?
While it's good to question DRM as a whole, media needs to be held to the same standard as other digital goods (software).
You beat me to it!!! Argh.
It's also on Rare and Remixed from BT himself, Track 3, Disk 2.
The Fibbonacci Sequence by BT (Brian Transeau).
The only lyrics in the song are the Fibbonacci Sequence (go figure).
While you make an elegant argument, you forget that AT&T will control a significant portion of the DSL market, which would allow AT&T to set forth the same anti-trust/anti-competitive behavior (by filtering VoIP data).
Not to mention AT&T would then have control of the bigger half of cellular customers in America (Cingular/AT&T Wireless). The last step would be their re-acquisition of Verizon (which would be epic at this point, as Verizon just acquired MCI, which was one of the companies AT&T flagged as a "competitor" in their earlier anti-trust proceedings).
So as a consumer, I can see this leading down a very dark road for consumers.
Gaim is not really a good example because its namesake and main functionality (gAIM), piggybacks on the AOL Instant Messanger server network. I do agree that Jabber functionality embedded in Gaim could be a good example, however, for the majority of users using Gaim, Jabber isn't a priority.
A better example could be Apache and the Apache Foundation (but they get a lot of money from people), and the absolute best example I can think of are Seamonkey and Firefox from Mozilla. None of these products are directly sponsored, though they do get money from bigger organizations to recoup costs of things like bandwidth, though BitTorrent could be used to significantly offset a lot of that (which is another good example).
So what have we learned? Corporate sponsorship happens because people need money to get things done. Most organizations don't care where the money is coming from, just that they're getting it. And I think at the heart of things, that's what Larry Ellison is trying to say.
Not if they're integer operations. Then its 59 teraiops.
I still prefer 59 teracyclops though.
It's also worthwhile to note how this thing stacks up to its "competitor", the iPod nano.
.45" x 3.54, 1.8" LCD, 35 Hr Battery Life
Dimensions:
Samsung's Z5: 1.66" x
iPod Nano: 1.6" x 0.27" x 3.5, 1.5" LCD, ~14 Hr Battery Life
Take two Nanos, stack one on top of another and you get a realization of how thick this thing is. But, with that extra thickness you pick up twice as much battery life (that should be a no brainer, seeing as doubling the size would double the available room to stash a battery). The screen is larger, but only marginally, and from the pictures it's at a strange aspect ratio (like that of a Cellphone) compared to the Nano's more naturally shaped screen (4x3?). Also worthy to note that the interface is going to be strikingly different, and that the Nano has Apple's FairPlay DRM vs. Microsoft's WMP10-DRM and some other DRM system called "Janus" (according to its product spec sheet). The Samsung unit will only ship with DRM compatibility for Windows (Media Player 10, sorry Mac users), and the unit comes in Black and Silver.
My opinion? It looks like a cellphone and an MP3 player got in a fight and the cellphone lost in a serious way. It's not particularly attractive looking with it's goofy offsized display, and the interface is questionable to say the least (the touchpad's square shape alone leaves one to question). It'll be interesting to see what impact, if any, it will have on the market.