I can't imagine anything is going to happen here, especially against powerhouses like Corsair, Kingston, and PNY.
What's especially surprising is that the company suing, SanDisk, actually manufactures things. Usually the plaintiff is not involved in manufacturing products that could be alleged to infringe upon the patents owned by the defendant. Expect to see several of these companies to countersue... they should be able to find some vague patents in their portfolios to throw back at SanDisk.
WTO spokesman Blake Stowell said, "We have an open and shut case. We will show any reporter the details provided they sign a nondisclosure agreement. We have found clear evidence of US contributions to the WTO."
Wow, you're right to highlight the fact that they indicate retrograde satellites might be the cause. Iapetus itself is in an unusually inclined and distant prograde orbit... I hadn't heard any retrograde satellite theories for the dark region.
That sort of raises the point that along with grade inflation, the world has experienced job title inflation. I'm kind of bummed that I'm a boring old "staff engineer" when somewhere else they might call me "Manager of Senior Engineering Analyst Development Engineer Scientist"
Also is it just me or does it seem like with the IBM deal that SUN is wanting to get deeper entrenched in the software business IBM wants to start to get out of it?
It's just you. IBM is the second-largest software company in the world, and software mints money.
I agree that it's not been an issue. And I agree that protectionism solves nothing.
But I am concerned about productivity growth in the growing number of service jobs that are left here. The WSJ had a very interesting article about how it may become more challenging to make things that you can export, like healthcare and food service, more and more productive every year. I'd guess we'd better hope that the productivity gains of overseas economies can be imported in that case.
When a country exports all of it's facilities, manufacturing, and infastructure overseas, how long before that countries trading partners realize that they can cut the country out of the loop entirely?
Sure they could, but they need customers. The loop that the US needs to be worried about getting cut out of is the profit loop. Sure there are lots of manufacturers in China and the rest of Asia, but they're in killer competition to underbid each other to manufacture stuff designed in the US or Japan and sold in the US with the profits going not to the manufacturers, but to those foreign corporations. What they want is more of the total profit, but to get that, they need better brands and more of a retail channel. They'll be looking to acquire that.
How exactly is Solaris proprietary? I'm not quite sure what you mean by that word. Given that it's been open-sourced and has had major technologies (ZFS, DTrace) incorporated in other other systems (BSD, OS X) I can't see how it's any less open than (say) Linux.
That's not really the issue in business. The issue is who's paying the developers and selling support. So s/proprietary// and you still get something IBM doesn't want to foot the bill for: a second flavor of Unix.
IBM just wants a unix for its systems without having to pay to maintain AIX.
That'd make sense 1) if IBM had actually ported AIX to x86 and was paying to maintain it. 2) Solaris ran on Power 3) Sun would actually maintain Solaris on Power.
I think that Sun may finally not be overpriced. It's forward P/E is similar to IBM's. I guess it depends on how correct the analysts are about Sun's prospects next year.
I've often wondered if IBM would just up and buy Sun, but there's a few reasons I think it would be a poor acquisition. First of all, the past five years or so have proven that the remaining Sun customers will not jump ship just because Sun's not building the fastest or cheapest unix boxes. These customers stick around because, for some reason, they like Sun. I won't speculate as to why, but there are quite a few reasons why that can be. If IBM buys Sun, those customers immediately like Sun a lot less, because they've been choosing Sun over IBM for years. Secondly, IBM has worked very hard for the past couple decades to never retire any substantial enterprise architecture. Combining AS/400 and RS/6000 has been a decade long project with the loyal AS/400 customers being skeptical the whole way. What does Sun bring? A second proprietary flavor of Unix, another line of RISC unix boxes with a different architecture, another blade chassis, and this newfangled exotic Niagara/Rock architecture. Looking at IBM's server history, they'd retire none of this, and development costs wouldn't decline. They'd rather that Sun foot the bill for continuing development of UltraSPARC and Solaris for a static or declining market, rather than buy those customers only to chase them away when killing the architecture, like what happened with Alpha. I don't see IBM paying $25B to Sun to merely begin making Sun's business worthless. (And I don't think that was the plan with DEC-Alpha, but I don't think Compaq planned on getting enveloped by HP.)
IBM wants growing businesses that improve their profit margin. If IBM could buy select parts of Sun, they might, even if they hardly ever make hardware acquisitions, but they really couldn't get the good without the bad, and even if they did, who knows what goodwill is lost when the profits go to Armonk rather than Silicon Valley?
Think how many people could have been fed with this money.
Or we could replace just one bridge over the Mississippi River... quite frankly I'm glad they're spending it on Mars, but I'm not commuting to work in Minneapolis. I think space missions are getting cheaper relative to bridges, too.
Since they now own ATI, AMD is already fabbing GPUs with TSMC. Gotta think a big part of the merger is taking that fabless model to the other chips where it makes sense. Does leveraging the TSMC link that ATI already has mean AMD is going fabless? Or, if they go with the new "Common Platform" of IBM, Chartered, Samsung, Freescale etc to provide additional capacity when needed, does that indicate a shift away from owning fabs? Yet on the other hand, you couldn't blame them for wanting to sell the Dresden fabs, take a cash infusion and make someone else responsible for those salaries. Kind of depends on the buyer, and whether they continue letting AMD get first dibs on wafer starts. Freescale was taken private, TI's abandoning process development, memory divisions are spun-off or joint-ventured monthly... I'm not making bets.
I was thinking along the same lines. If you can send information back in time, all that you need to do is send that information to the destination at the fastest means available, and then send it back in time. That would then be FTL communication, to any location.
The real trick is to actually send it even farther back in time, so that the pizza deliveryman anticipates your hunger and arrives before you even make the phone call.
Me personally, I know that EVERYTIME I install software, no matter how rarely I wish to use it, I have to check and remove all this GARBAGE that they put into my start up. You gave a list of things such as scanners, DVD burners. I use those rarely.
Speaking of, how do I get the damn iPodService.exe and iTunesHelper.exe programs to go away for good? Can't find anything within iTunes.
The chips didn't exist as 3-D objects prior to this? Infact, wouldn't a chip that only exists in two dimensions be much more difficult to make?
One layer of silicon substrate, followed by many layers of polysilicon and wires and insulator. There is as of yet no practical way to fabricate to transistors on top of each other on a wafer. It's always the transistor on bottom, wiring on top. The transistors themselves are only a 2D array (but yes they are 3D devices). Sounds like this technique bores holes through the silicon substrate to make contact with another wafer below, so you could conceivably have transistors above and below.
otherwise it's back to square one with a circuit board that has to pick up the lines and reroute them to other components, and the advantage of this technology would be zilch.
There is no implied change in the chip packaging that is the interface to a circuit board. There are already plenty of packages that have two chip dice side-by-side. This will just stack the dice on top of each other within the package.
Slashdot Mirror
You're totally right. Their timeline indicates the upgraded every 5 years. Good customers. Except they defected to Amdahl. That traitor.
WTO spokesman Blake Stowell said, "We have an open and shut case. We will show any reporter the details provided they sign a nondisclosure agreement. We have found clear evidence of US contributions to the WTO."
Wow, you're right to highlight the fact that they indicate retrograde satellites might be the cause. Iapetus itself is in an unusually inclined and distant prograde orbit... I hadn't heard any retrograde satellite theories for the dark region.
That sort of raises the point that along with grade inflation, the world has experienced job title inflation. I'm kind of bummed that I'm a boring old "staff engineer" when somewhere else they might call me "Manager of Senior Engineering Analyst Development Engineer Scientist"
But I am concerned about productivity growth in the growing number of service jobs that are left here. The WSJ had a very interesting article about how it may become more challenging to make things that you can export, like healthcare and food service, more and more productive every year. I'd guess we'd better hope that the productivity gains of overseas economies can be imported in that case.
Do three fictions make a truth?
I think that Sun may finally not be overpriced. It's forward P/E is similar to IBM's. I guess it depends on how correct the analysts are about Sun's prospects next year.
I've often wondered if IBM would just up and buy Sun, but there's a few reasons I think it would be a poor acquisition. First of all, the past five years or so have proven that the remaining Sun customers will not jump ship just because Sun's not building the fastest or cheapest unix boxes. These customers stick around because, for some reason, they like Sun. I won't speculate as to why, but there are quite a few reasons why that can be. If IBM buys Sun, those customers immediately like Sun a lot less, because they've been choosing Sun over IBM for years. Secondly, IBM has worked very hard for the past couple decades to never retire any substantial enterprise architecture. Combining AS/400 and RS/6000 has been a decade long project with the loyal AS/400 customers being skeptical the whole way. What does Sun bring? A second proprietary flavor of Unix, another line of RISC unix boxes with a different architecture, another blade chassis, and this newfangled exotic Niagara/Rock architecture. Looking at IBM's server history, they'd retire none of this, and development costs wouldn't decline. They'd rather that Sun foot the bill for continuing development of UltraSPARC and Solaris for a static or declining market, rather than buy those customers only to chase them away when killing the architecture, like what happened with Alpha. I don't see IBM paying $25B to Sun to merely begin making Sun's business worthless. (And I don't think that was the plan with DEC-Alpha, but I don't think Compaq planned on getting enveloped by HP.)
IBM wants growing businesses that improve their profit margin. If IBM could buy select parts of Sun, they might, even if they hardly ever make hardware acquisitions, but they really couldn't get the good without the bad, and even if they did, who knows what goodwill is lost when the profits go to Armonk rather than Silicon Valley?
It's totally going to be WoW and the Deathly Hallows.
I'd assume they wouldn't want or need a pilot, but that's not mentioned.
Since they now own ATI, AMD is already fabbing GPUs with TSMC. Gotta think a big part of the merger is taking that fabless model to the other chips where it makes sense. Does leveraging the TSMC link that ATI already has mean AMD is going fabless? Or, if they go with the new "Common Platform" of IBM, Chartered, Samsung, Freescale etc to provide additional capacity when needed, does that indicate a shift away from owning fabs? Yet on the other hand, you couldn't blame them for wanting to sell the Dresden fabs, take a cash infusion and make someone else responsible for those salaries. Kind of depends on the buyer, and whether they continue letting AMD get first dibs on wafer starts. Freescale was taken private, TI's abandoning process development, memory divisions are spun-off or joint-ventured monthly... I'm not making bets.
I was thinking along the same lines. If you can send information back in time, all that you need to do is send that information to the destination at the fastest means available, and then send it back in time. That would then be FTL communication, to any location.
The real trick is to actually send it even farther back in time, so that the pizza deliveryman anticipates your hunger and arrives before you even make the phone call.
Not that it's the usual 27-page article, but still...