My very uninformed view of China's space program so far is that it's largely been purchased Russian technology with some in-house few updates. This makes sense for everyone, since Russia has been consistently launching rockets and orbiters for decades now, and China might as well take a little help to get some experience.
This time, from the article, it looks to like China will be doing the "interesting" science portion of this joint mission and Russia "just" does the pushing. Yes, others have built planetary landers before, but not so many that task is mature or easy.
So, this might be China's coming out party with respect to space research and technology. And then they'll shoot for the moon... (literally).
IMHO, it's soooo easy to watch the videos and share the videos. It used to be a royal pain to put video on your small or personal website. Real Audio? Windows Media? Quicktime? They were all problem prone. The odds of having those work for more than... oh, 70% of your viewers was slim at best. OS support, plugins working, and having the server side software -- it was all a mess. Never mind the bandwidth requirements. YouTube made it easy. Since more than 90% of people have Flash installed, and Flash video seems idiot proof (to watch), the whole video thing is now practical. Plus YouTube provides the bandwidth, and cut-and-paste HTML for sharing.
In hindsight, it's a simple concept, executed well, and with good timing. That said, I wouldn't spend a billion for it. I don't think people care where they host their videos as long as it's free, quick, and easy. I doubt that many people actually browse YouTube, so switching costs for video sharers and viewers is pretty much zero.
I've had a lot of trouble trying to print from Inkscape (in Windows). Xara is miles ahead in that department -- and that's using a version from 2002 or so. Also, Xara is FAST - for simple drawings, it doesn't matter, but the bigger the image gets, the longer Inkscape takes to render. Oh, and the bitmap tracer in Xara (@2002) is awesome.
That's not to say that Inkscape isn't a great program -- it is.
Program trading is HUGE already. The bulk of that trading is probably ETF's and other mutual funds that are automatically rebalancing to match changes in the indexes and what not. Another chunk are programs catching split second arbitrage opportunities. So it's not quite the same type of investment that is implied by the summary, but it's scary nevertheless. Who knows how all of the programs will interact with each other over the open market during a really weird chain of events? It could be disasterous... for people on the loosing end of that day, anyway.
My quick google search for a reference came up with this direct from the NYSE: 70% of trades are program trades in June of 2004. It's an old article, IIRC, I've seen a more recent number that was closer to 90% of all trades being program trades.
I've often wondered when someone would get around to perfecting a dispersed backup system for LAN's. With the average workstation toteing 100GB drives, and the average use of a handful of GB's, there seems to be a surplus of cheap disk space on the LAN... at least compared to backup tapes or other media. Though, in hindsight, I guess a single fire or building disaster would still be catastrophic...
The rumors had been making a LOT more sense the last couple months, so it got to the point where I figured the Dell deal was already signed.
First, Dell had already broken it's Intel only stance by committing to offering AMD Quad CPU servers.
Second, the ATI purchase and NY fab announcements were so close together that for the banks to finance the purchases (with loans rather than shares!), someone signing the loan offer had to be very convinced that business was going to be growing.
Third, Dell isn't stupid. AMD's share, especially in servers, was getting to the point where Dell would start to loose a noticable number of corporate sales. If a mid-sized company wants to standardize on one vendor for servers and workstations, then sooner or later Dell starts to loose workstation and laptop sales. The Opterons were that good in the server area -- and while Woodcrest servers seem to be excellent, it's a new server architecture, and it takes a lot of time for a company to validate a new CPU.
Lastly, AMD has all the pieces of the puzzle now. They've got more than one fab (granted they're next door to each other, but at least they've started production via a contract fab, Chartered). They've got the full range of chips -- the Turion mobiles are reasonably power competitive. And with the ATI purchase, AMD is able to offer the complete reference design and support.
It's not like we're all Pavlovs dogs. You do NOT have to answer your cellphone the second you hear it! Leave the cell phone on in the car. Then you'll at least know to check for voicemail or pull over to take the call -- OK, that last one isn't applicable to freeway driving.
I probably let it ring through to voicemail more than half the time. It's a good habit to make sure people don't expect you to answer the phone 24x7.
I have this happen to me too. I suspect it has to do with the angle that the cellphone is at. When it's lying on the table, the antenna aims out the windows usually. Whereas once I pick it up to dial, the signal has to go through much more building material. I think I can see a pattern when I change the angle of the phone, but it's hardly scientific. It could be that I have a metal plate in my head that I didn't know about.:)
FWIW, my cell signal at home is marginal. It's pretty good on the south side, towards what I think is the transmitter's location, and very iffy everywhere else.
I probably wasn't old enough to care about anything other than games when the controller you describe was sold... however, I'm going to guess that it was just too expensive a feature when computers got cheaper and cheaper. If you want a drive controller with DIMMs for cache, just check out the server RAID controllers - each card cost more than a cheap Dell workstation!
IMHO, hibernate works reasonably well. The biggest problems in my personal use relate to network activities that can't be worked around with the "cached" concept. Network connections die and often programs don't know what to do.
My idea for saving power in the office would revolve around a smarter use of Wake-on-Lan. Maybe a central server to boot up all the PC's at 8:00AM or so. But that's another story...
There's nothing preventing you from creating a separate partition for the swap file in Windows. But personally, I think the Windows way is more flexible. Why use up a large chunk of hard drive space for that one time you happen to use an obnoxious amount of swap?
Besides, only in rare circumstances will the swap file fragment - if your swap file is grows automatically, it usually won't fragment badly unless the drive is mostly full and fragmented. For most people, slashdot crowd excepted, hard drives are ridiculously large, so the swap won't fragment.
At first glance, this is a stupid idea for AMD, but upon reflection, it isn't that bad. We've got to look at the 5 year picture for a deal of this size. What will AMD need to do to be more successful in 5 years than they are today? Well, despite what the teenage gamers will say, it actually doesn't mean having the highest FPS in Quake 5. The stable, highest volume, and generally profitable sales are in corporate servers and workstations. That's Dell, HP, and to a lesser extent Gateway, Lenovo, et al. So, what do they need from AMD or Intel? They want cheap, fast, reliable supply, few defects, and ease of integrating into the individual computers. After several years of the Athlon and Opteron, AMD is only now starting to get a toe hold in workstations and a reasonable share of server CPUs.
IMHO, AMD would be well advised to start shipping it's own chipsets, just like Intel. It just makes things easier for their most important customers, the big OEMs. They have one less vendor to worry about. There's less testing required, since presumably AMD would test the CPU and chipset together. And it's less risky for both customers and AMD since AMD has a very strong incentive to make sure that chipsets will be available for their platform on time, whereas third parties have different priorities.
Then there's the whole GPU angle. Why shouldn't GPUs be produced in company owned, i.e. tweaked for performance, fabs? They're every bit as complex and big and expensive as CPUs. Bringing that in house should give a nice bump to performance. And what is a GPU going to be in five years anyway? On the AMD platform, all the tools are in place to allow the GPU to work much more like a cheap DSP/co-processor than we've ever seen before. If the Opteron wasn't an Itanium killer, maybe a couple Opterons and a couple "GPU-DSPs" will do the trick. Even for regular workstations, imagine just plugging a GPU into a free socket on the MB? That would fit very nicely in the middle of the graphics market... way better than integrated, but way cheaper than an add-on card.
Lastly, AMD needs a way to use the last generation fab equipment a little longer. Making chipsets would let them use the fab equipment for an extra few years. They lost that cost efficiency when they spun off the flash business. Fab gear is expensive, so it's kind of a waste for them to be yanking it out everytime the minimum for a marketable CPU moves higher.
Five years ago AMD needed partners and an ecosystem to support their own platform and survive as a company. The next five years are about turning the CPU market into a duopoly.
I have a few shares of AMD. And I'd like to see this deal happen, but only at a decent price (from AMD's point of view). Hmm... this post turned rather long...
I'm a little surprised that Conroe is still a single processor only option. I guess it makes sense though, there are a whole lot of dual CPU servers sold, so they'd like to keep those markets separated... still it seems wasteful to buy Xeons for a workstation.
While reading the Ars article, it sounded eerily like Apple needed the AMD 4x4 platform concept - which is basically releasing Athon64's that can do dual-cpu but without the "server" chip premium. How AMD plans to prevent dual CPU servers based on A64's is another matter...
Anyway, while I doubt that Apple would split their CPU supplier contracts at this time, there's not much downside to doing it. Heck, even Dell is about to do it. Why not keep pressure on Intel to compete for future business?
I'm not familiar with the Zend encoder, but I would assume that it strips out comments and changes variables to something serialized rather than descriptive. If that's the case, then this would be about the same as every "decompiler" that gets released for every programming environment at one point or another. Yes, nicely indented and spaced code is easier to read than assembly (or whatever zend encoded code is), but it's still a far cry from "open source".
Now, if this actually does reconstruct the original source files, well, then there's a serious problem.
Folks here are dissing software RAID a tad too much. This isn't the dark old days of critically limited CPU and bus bandwidth. With dual core CPU's, more often than not CPU processing capacity is far in excess. So, for many reasonably light loads, why not save a few bucks on the RAID controller? Heck, for the cost of a "real" hardware RAID card (never mind a battery backed one), you can buy a 2nd CPU which will be more flexible since it'll help both RAID speed calculation times and regular processing tasks. Sure, you wouldn't run top end database servers on software RAID 5, but there are many applications where speed is not important, but downtime is.
Remember that stupidly annoying FBI warning on your DVD movies? That pretty much tells you exactly whether or not you are allowed to use parts of the movie for your own purposes. Simply put, you're not. Now you can contact the movie publishers or one of their agents to buy an appropriate license for a price -- at least I assume so. I know that many TV shows have programs for that sort of situation. Similarly, there's a well outlined method for using music for your public events and corporate use.
Yes, advertisers bid on search words (or keywords in the case of GoogleAdsense on third party web pages). Yes, Google claims that the bids set the rates for what you get. However, as far as I know, the bid-mininum calculations are not audited. To be fair, I haven't looked; however, if the bids were audited, I would expect Google to make a bigger fuss about it. Other marketing channels do not make "bids" public either, so really, I can't fault Google too much.
Nevertheless, it's not nearly the same as say eBay, if I'm outbid on an item, I can see a list of users who bid on the item. On Google, when I'm playing advertiser, it's really a black box. This is especially true when minimum bids are involved -- for those not familiar, Google sets minimum bids for certain combinations of your ad text, your link target page content, and (I think) competing bids.
Anyway, Google Adwords is still a great deal for small advertisers. I've had far more success with it than with Yahoo, at least so far.
As long as your piece of hardware is faster in some subset of some test in some benchmark, you'll be able to advertise "xx% faster". It's not limited to computer gear either, every car is "best" in this or "first" in that...
Toshiba has a lot of the IP behind HD DVD. They stand to get a few bucks from 10's of millions of (legally licensed) HD DVD player manufactured in the next decade -- but only if HD DVD wins.
Loosing a few bucks on initial HD DVD shipments is chump change in comparison.
Be glad that they're going to eventually replace those "ancient" nukes with something a little cleaner, safer, or cheaper. For some reason, flying 50 year old B52's is cool and kind of cute, but tossing around 50 year old nukes doesn't instill confidence. The USA will have nukes for generations to come, they might as well be up to date.
Yep, the key issue is something that people must be aware of before using EFS for backups. The keys can be copied and moved. There are good instructions for this on MSDN or MSKB, or probably both, not too hard to find. And remember to keep a couple copies of the key on floppy or CD or something. And TEST the restore procedure, preferably more than once! The interface to backup and restore keys is a tad clunky, but not too bad. You only need to do it once on the backup machine, once on a test machine, and if you need to restore onto new hardware in the distant future, once more there.
The problem with TrueCrypt (actually, I've haven't checked, so it might not be a problem) is that the backup software expects a drive there and writeable -- it's on an overnight scheduled task. To use TrueCrypt, I would have to create a batch file of some sort to test for the existence of the USB drive, mount the TrueCrypt volume, detect the completion of the backup(s), and then unmount the TrueCrypt volume. It's probably doable, but I'm pretty happy with the EFS setup.
I'm not aware (nor really concerned) about the EFS encryption quality as long as it's reasonably secure -- not many firms do any encryption of offsite backups (heck, most firms our size don't do off-site backups at all).
FWIW, I use TrueCrypt for my personal backups at home. It's a good program.
NTFS encryption seems to be pretty fast -- we use it for doing encrypted backups onto portable USB hard drives. The bottleneck seems to be the hard drive speed rather than the encryption. I think we put about 40GB on the USB drives in under an hour or so. Mind you, the drives aren't that fast, they're the little laptop drives, plus there's the USB overhead. Perhaps, rather than looking for a faster encryption program you need faster/more hard drives. Lots of data is slow to push around and if the source and destination are on the same disk, that's a lot of disk seeks to deal with.
Ok, this isn't exactly going to be a hit with the scientific HPC community who already have all the clustering software that they need. But, think about MS's best customers, corporations. Imagine a new scheduling module for an ERP. If the model is complex enough, and if it has enough components and rules, it can easily become a major burden for a single server. And no, database clustering isn't necessarily the same -- not everything can be coded as a SQL statement, and even if they can, it isn't necessarily a smart way to apply a particular algo to a set of data. A Microsoft Windows based HPC unit would be perfect for the independent software vendor to use to power their new module -- assuming of course that the ERP itself runs on Windows. Odds are good that at least the client-side application is Windows compatible.
I guess eBay got tired of being always "threatened" (at least in the eyes of the media) by every new beta product out of Google. How's that non-existant Google wallet doing?
Anyway, this will be appreciated by small-time website publishers. A couple years ago there was only one reputable pay per click option for most small sites, Google's adsense. Nobody really knew how much of a share Google takes from each click -- actually, we still don't. But a little bit of competition will hopefully drive the payout rate a bit more towards the website owner. Of course, that won't be very good for Google's profits.
That's it, Intel chips have now more or less reached price-performance parity with AMD. They can no longer receive monopoly profits. Is this going to hurt AMD, oh yes. Will AMD break? Nope. It's too late. AMD is well entrenched in the server space, and that's what counts. It gets their foot in the door with every Tier-1 OEM and the vast majority of Fortune 500 enterprises. And it will take a LOT more than cut-rate prices to regain monopoly power. Never mind the huge damage to Intel's bottom line that will occur. Long live AMD.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, this is very significant.
My very uninformed view of China's space program so far is that it's largely been purchased Russian technology with some in-house few updates. This makes sense for everyone, since Russia has been consistently launching rockets and orbiters for decades now, and China might as well take a little help to get some experience.
This time, from the article, it looks to like China will be doing the "interesting" science portion of this joint mission and Russia "just" does the pushing. Yes, others have built planetary landers before, but not so many that task is mature or easy.
So, this might be China's coming out party with respect to space research and technology. And then they'll shoot for the moon... (literally).
Really, what made YouTube a success?
IMHO, it's soooo easy to watch the videos and share the videos. It used to be a royal pain to put video on your small or personal website. Real Audio? Windows Media? Quicktime? They were all problem prone. The odds of having those work for more than... oh, 70% of your viewers was slim at best. OS support, plugins working, and having the server side software -- it was all a mess. Never mind the bandwidth requirements. YouTube made it easy. Since more than 90% of people have Flash installed, and Flash video seems idiot proof (to watch), the whole video thing is now practical. Plus YouTube provides the bandwidth, and cut-and-paste HTML for sharing.
In hindsight, it's a simple concept, executed well, and with good timing. That said, I wouldn't spend a billion for it. I don't think people care where they host their videos as long as it's free, quick, and easy. I doubt that many people actually browse YouTube, so switching costs for video sharers and viewers is pretty much zero.
I've had a lot of trouble trying to print from Inkscape (in Windows). Xara is miles ahead in that department -- and that's using a version from 2002 or so. Also, Xara is FAST - for simple drawings, it doesn't matter, but the bigger the image gets, the longer Inkscape takes to render. Oh, and the bitmap tracer in Xara (@2002) is awesome.
That's not to say that Inkscape isn't a great program -- it is.
Program trading is HUGE already. The bulk of that trading is probably ETF's and other mutual funds that are automatically rebalancing to match changes in the indexes and what not. Another chunk are programs catching split second arbitrage opportunities. So it's not quite the same type of investment that is implied by the summary, but it's scary nevertheless. Who knows how all of the programs will interact with each other over the open market during a really weird chain of events? It could be disasterous... for people on the loosing end of that day, anyway.
My quick google search for a reference came up with this direct from the NYSE: 70% of trades are program trades in June of 2004. It's an old article, IIRC, I've seen a more recent number that was closer to 90% of all trades being program trades.
I've often wondered when someone would get around to perfecting a dispersed backup system for LAN's. With the average workstation toteing 100GB drives, and the average use of a handful of GB's, there seems to be a surplus of cheap disk space on the LAN... at least compared to backup tapes or other media. Though, in hindsight, I guess a single fire or building disaster would still be catastrophic...
The rumors had been making a LOT more sense the last couple months, so it got to the point where I figured the Dell deal was already signed.
First, Dell had already broken it's Intel only stance by committing to offering AMD Quad CPU servers.
Second, the ATI purchase and NY fab announcements were so close together that for the banks to finance the purchases (with loans rather than shares!), someone signing the loan offer had to be very convinced that business was going to be growing.
Third, Dell isn't stupid. AMD's share, especially in servers, was getting to the point where Dell would start to loose a noticable number of corporate sales. If a mid-sized company wants to standardize on one vendor for servers and workstations, then sooner or later Dell starts to loose workstation and laptop sales. The Opterons were that good in the server area -- and while Woodcrest servers seem to be excellent, it's a new server architecture, and it takes a lot of time for a company to validate a new CPU.
Lastly, AMD has all the pieces of the puzzle now. They've got more than one fab (granted they're next door to each other, but at least they've started production via a contract fab, Chartered). They've got the full range of chips -- the Turion mobiles are reasonably power competitive. And with the ATI purchase, AMD is able to offer the complete reference design and support.
So, IMHO it was a matter of time.
It's not like we're all Pavlovs dogs. You do NOT have to answer your cellphone the second you hear it! Leave the cell phone on in the car. Then you'll at least know to check for voicemail or pull over to take the call -- OK, that last one isn't applicable to freeway driving.
I probably let it ring through to voicemail more than half the time. It's a good habit to make sure people don't expect you to answer the phone 24x7.
I have this happen to me too. I suspect it has to do with the angle that the cellphone is at. When it's lying on the table, the antenna aims out the windows usually. Whereas once I pick it up to dial, the signal has to go through much more building material. I think I can see a pattern when I change the angle of the phone, but it's hardly scientific. It could be that I have a metal plate in my head that I didn't know about. :)
FWIW, my cell signal at home is marginal. It's pretty good on the south side, towards what I think is the transmitter's location, and very iffy everywhere else.
I probably wasn't old enough to care about anything other than games when the controller you describe was sold... however, I'm going to guess that it was just too expensive a feature when computers got cheaper and cheaper. If you want a drive controller with DIMMs for cache, just check out the server RAID controllers - each card cost more than a cheap Dell workstation!
IMHO, hibernate works reasonably well. The biggest problems in my personal use relate to network activities that can't be worked around with the "cached" concept. Network connections die and often programs don't know what to do.
My idea for saving power in the office would revolve around a smarter use of Wake-on-Lan. Maybe a central server to boot up all the PC's at 8:00AM or so. But that's another story...
There's nothing preventing you from creating a separate partition for the swap file in Windows. But personally, I think the Windows way is more flexible. Why use up a large chunk of hard drive space for that one time you happen to use an obnoxious amount of swap?
Besides, only in rare circumstances will the swap file fragment - if your swap file is grows automatically, it usually won't fragment badly unless the drive is mostly full and fragmented. For most people, slashdot crowd excepted, hard drives are ridiculously large, so the swap won't fragment.
At first glance, this is a stupid idea for AMD, but upon reflection, it isn't that bad. We've got to look at the 5 year picture for a deal of this size. What will AMD need to do to be more successful in 5 years than they are today? Well, despite what the teenage gamers will say, it actually doesn't mean having the highest FPS in Quake 5. The stable, highest volume, and generally profitable sales are in corporate servers and workstations. That's Dell, HP, and to a lesser extent Gateway, Lenovo, et al. So, what do they need from AMD or Intel? They want cheap, fast, reliable supply, few defects, and ease of integrating into the individual computers. After several years of the Athlon and Opteron, AMD is only now starting to get a toe hold in workstations and a reasonable share of server CPUs.
IMHO, AMD would be well advised to start shipping it's own chipsets, just like Intel. It just makes things easier for their most important customers, the big OEMs. They have one less vendor to worry about. There's less testing required, since presumably AMD would test the CPU and chipset together. And it's less risky for both customers and AMD since AMD has a very strong incentive to make sure that chipsets will be available for their platform on time, whereas third parties have different priorities.
Then there's the whole GPU angle. Why shouldn't GPUs be produced in company owned, i.e. tweaked for performance, fabs? They're every bit as complex and big and expensive as CPUs. Bringing that in house should give a nice bump to performance. And what is a GPU going to be in five years anyway? On the AMD platform, all the tools are in place to allow the GPU to work much more like a cheap DSP/co-processor than we've ever seen before. If the Opteron wasn't an Itanium killer, maybe a couple Opterons and a couple "GPU-DSPs" will do the trick. Even for regular workstations, imagine just plugging a GPU into a free socket on the MB? That would fit very nicely in the middle of the graphics market... way better than integrated, but way cheaper than an add-on card.
Lastly, AMD needs a way to use the last generation fab equipment a little longer. Making chipsets would let them use the fab equipment for an extra few years. They lost that cost efficiency when they spun off the flash business. Fab gear is expensive, so it's kind of a waste for them to be yanking it out everytime the minimum for a marketable CPU moves higher.
Five years ago AMD needed partners and an ecosystem to support their own platform and survive as a company. The next five years are about turning the CPU market into a duopoly.
I have a few shares of AMD. And I'd like to see this deal happen, but only at a decent price (from AMD's point of view). Hmm... this post turned rather long...
I'm a little surprised that Conroe is still a single processor only option. I guess it makes sense though, there are a whole lot of dual CPU servers sold, so they'd like to keep those markets separated... still it seems wasteful to buy Xeons for a workstation.
While reading the Ars article, it sounded eerily like Apple needed the AMD 4x4 platform concept - which is basically releasing Athon64's that can do dual-cpu but without the "server" chip premium. How AMD plans to prevent dual CPU servers based on A64's is another matter...
Anyway, while I doubt that Apple would split their CPU supplier contracts at this time, there's not much downside to doing it. Heck, even Dell is about to do it. Why not keep pressure on Intel to compete for future business?
I'm not familiar with the Zend encoder, but I would assume that it strips out comments and changes variables to something serialized rather than descriptive. If that's the case, then this would be about the same as every "decompiler" that gets released for every programming environment at one point or another. Yes, nicely indented and spaced code is easier to read than assembly (or whatever zend encoded code is), but it's still a far cry from "open source".
Now, if this actually does reconstruct the original source files, well, then there's a serious problem.
I tend to stand at the computer every once in a while -- actually I'd do it more often but people look at me funny. :)
It's great to get the blood circulation going, and it's really hard to fall asleep when you are standing up.
Folks here are dissing software RAID a tad too much. This isn't the dark old days of critically limited CPU and bus bandwidth. With dual core CPU's, more often than not CPU processing capacity is far in excess. So, for many reasonably light loads, why not save a few bucks on the RAID controller? Heck, for the cost of a "real" hardware RAID card (never mind a battery backed one), you can buy a 2nd CPU which will be more flexible since it'll help both RAID speed calculation times and regular processing tasks. Sure, you wouldn't run top end database servers on software RAID 5, but there are many applications where speed is not important, but downtime is.
Remember that stupidly annoying FBI warning on your DVD movies? That pretty much tells you exactly whether or not you are allowed to use parts of the movie for your own purposes. Simply put, you're not. Now you can contact the movie publishers or one of their agents to buy an appropriate license for a price -- at least I assume so. I know that many TV shows have programs for that sort of situation. Similarly, there's a well outlined method for using music for your public events and corporate use.
IANAL, yada yada yada.
Yes, advertisers bid on search words (or keywords in the case of GoogleAdsense on third party web pages). Yes, Google claims that the bids set the rates for what you get. However, as far as I know, the bid-mininum calculations are not audited. To be fair, I haven't looked; however, if the bids were audited, I would expect Google to make a bigger fuss about it. Other marketing channels do not make "bids" public either, so really, I can't fault Google too much.
Nevertheless, it's not nearly the same as say eBay, if I'm outbid on an item, I can see a list of users who bid on the item. On Google, when I'm playing advertiser, it's really a black box. This is especially true when minimum bids are involved -- for those not familiar, Google sets minimum bids for certain combinations of your ad text, your link target page content, and (I think) competing bids.
Anyway, Google Adwords is still a great deal for small advertisers. I've had far more success with it than with Yahoo, at least so far.
As long as your piece of hardware is faster in some subset of some test in some benchmark, you'll be able to advertise "xx% faster". It's not limited to computer gear either, every car is "best" in this or "first" in that...
Toshiba has a lot of the IP behind HD DVD. They stand to get a few bucks from 10's of millions of (legally licensed) HD DVD player manufactured in the next decade -- but only if HD DVD wins.
Loosing a few bucks on initial HD DVD shipments is chump change in comparison.
Be glad that they're going to eventually replace those "ancient" nukes with something a little cleaner, safer, or cheaper. For some reason, flying 50 year old B52's is cool and kind of cute, but tossing around 50 year old nukes doesn't instill confidence. The USA will have nukes for generations to come, they might as well be up to date.
Yep, the key issue is something that people must be aware of before using EFS for backups. The keys can be copied and moved. There are good instructions for this on MSDN or MSKB, or probably both, not too hard to find. And remember to keep a couple copies of the key on floppy or CD or something. And TEST the restore procedure, preferably more than once! The interface to backup and restore keys is a tad clunky, but not too bad. You only need to do it once on the backup machine, once on a test machine, and if you need to restore onto new hardware in the distant future, once more there.
The problem with TrueCrypt (actually, I've haven't checked, so it might not be a problem) is that the backup software expects a drive there and writeable -- it's on an overnight scheduled task. To use TrueCrypt, I would have to create a batch file of some sort to test for the existence of the USB drive, mount the TrueCrypt volume, detect the completion of the backup(s), and then unmount the TrueCrypt volume. It's probably doable, but I'm pretty happy with the EFS setup.
I'm not aware (nor really concerned) about the EFS encryption quality as long as it's reasonably secure -- not many firms do any encryption of offsite backups (heck, most firms our size don't do off-site backups at all).
FWIW, I use TrueCrypt for my personal backups at home. It's a good program.
NTFS encryption seems to be pretty fast -- we use it for doing encrypted backups onto portable USB hard drives. The bottleneck seems to be the hard drive speed rather than the encryption. I think we put about 40GB on the USB drives in under an hour or so. Mind you, the drives aren't that fast, they're the little laptop drives, plus there's the USB overhead. Perhaps, rather than looking for a faster encryption program you need faster/more hard drives. Lots of data is slow to push around and if the source and destination are on the same disk, that's a lot of disk seeks to deal with.
Ok, this isn't exactly going to be a hit with the scientific HPC community who already have all the clustering software that they need. But, think about MS's best customers, corporations. Imagine a new scheduling module for an ERP. If the model is complex enough, and if it has enough components and rules, it can easily become a major burden for a single server. And no, database clustering isn't necessarily the same -- not everything can be coded as a SQL statement, and even if they can, it isn't necessarily a smart way to apply a particular algo to a set of data. A Microsoft Windows based HPC unit would be perfect for the independent software vendor to use to power their new module -- assuming of course that the ERP itself runs on Windows. Odds are good that at least the client-side application is Windows compatible.
I guess eBay got tired of being always "threatened" (at least in the eyes of the media) by every new beta product out of Google. How's that non-existant Google wallet doing?
Anyway, this will be appreciated by small-time website publishers. A couple years ago there was only one reputable pay per click option for most small sites, Google's adsense. Nobody really knew how much of a share Google takes from each click -- actually, we still don't. But a little bit of competition will hopefully drive the payout rate a bit more towards the website owner. Of course, that won't be very good for Google's profits.
That's it, Intel chips have now more or less reached price-performance parity with AMD. They can no longer receive monopoly profits. Is this going to hurt AMD, oh yes. Will AMD break? Nope. It's too late. AMD is well entrenched in the server space, and that's what counts. It gets their foot in the door with every Tier-1 OEM and the vast majority of Fortune 500 enterprises. And it will take a LOT more than cut-rate prices to regain monopoly power. Never mind the huge damage to Intel's bottom line that will occur. Long live AMD.