Size matters in that Intel can bring more money to bear on a problem than most of their competitors. That isn't really true for IBM who have massive fab operations building all sorts of chips, thus giving them an economy of scale that other Intel competitors simply don't have. They also maintain larger capacity by renting out some of their fab lines to people like AMD as well as true fabless chip design houses.
IBM is a huge, widely diversified company whose large chip fabricating facilities are arguably the best in the industry and certainly spend at least an appreciable percentage of the time with the best fab tech crown. They also have a reputation for quick and efficient execution, something that has been a problem for companies like AMD and Motorola in the past.
Furthermore, as a services company with a huge presence in major businesses and with govt. accounts all over the world they have the ear of purchasing managers everywhere. There's likely to be a major marketing catfight between Intel arguing that the P4 is the appropriate comparison and trying to maintain the effectiveness of Mhz=speed campaign against Apple and IBM who will gleefully set up comparisons puncturing that idea.
Intel doesn't have too many fools in its higher echelons. I'm sure they've got an appropriate pucker factor going.
AT&T did not give permission for anybody to connect non-AT&T equipment to their network. IBM didn't give permission to connect non-IBM front end processors to their mainframes. Heck, IBM didn't give permission to anybody to clone their machines either.
Would telephone competition, mainframe competition, or the PC market ever have developed without competitors reverse engineering and elbowing their way into the market?
According to the stock market IBM has a larger market cap than Intel. IBM often wins the title of most patents filed in the past year. Is this a worry for Intel? I think so, especially if IBM can make the claim that the press should be comparing clock speeds to the 1Ghz Itanium and not the 3 Ghz P4.
The PPC 970 is a 64 bit chip. It would be proper (IMO) to compare it to Intel's 64 bit solution the Itanium 2 According to Intel.com, Itanium 2 has a top speed of 1.0Ghz. The PPC 970 is likely going to be coming out in 6 months with a minimum speed of 1.8 Ghz and a max speed of 2.5Ghz.
Itanium 2 has a significant speed penalty running 32 bit code. PPC 970 has little to no speed penalty running 32 big code.
Actually what will turn Apple around will be things like offering servers that are cheaper than Windows and easier to operate (Xserve), creating a platform that runs more software than the competition, and provides more bang for your buck.
A simple chip speed up won't do it but these other things will.
The PPC 970 is a 64 bit processor. Wake me up when Intel makes a 64bit processor that cracks 2Ghz. Their current 'speed king' in 64 bits runs at 1Ghz. Look it up at Intel's website.
Oh, I don't know, in the 64 bit realm, a little speed comparison might be fun. In case you didn't know, Intel's fastest 64 bit chip is the Itanium 2 which ships at 900Mhz and 1Ghz speeds. Somehow I don't think they'll be hitting 2.5Ghz in the next 6 months.
I can't understand why so many insist on comparing Intel's 32 bit solutions to this chip which is a 64 bit solution. Intel ships a 64 bit solution too and I think that's the proper comparison.
Then again the max shipping speed on the Itanium 2 (Intel's fastest 64 bit chip) is 1Ghz.
I think the days of selling computers based on Mhz just drew to a close.
The question is how hard is it to organize 15 of your neighbors into a WISP and get better bandwidth service plus wireless area coverage at the same monthly cost.
On Fullerton ave in Chicago. The haul is pretty short from their pop. I priced that out for my church and we ended up running DSL business service with SBC and 5 static IPs. We're going to run some small services and try to make enough money to 'graduate' to a T-1 and then set up a WISP and really get some cash flow going.
For my house which is further out in the 'burbs, it's $700.
There's a difference between business and rent seeking. One's honorable, the other is not. Influencing/buying politicians to keep your business model profitable is not acceptable.
Essentially the problem is that the point at which we cease to own our telecom wiring is long before the wires are concentrated to a point where it would be practical for competitors to deliver service. If the demarcation point was simply moved from your exterior wall to the subdivision concentrator or the CO, we wouldn't be in this mess.
As T-1 prices drift lower and lower, won't more people just band together and share T's? The entire business community uses these lines and they are in a competitive market with lots of sellers there. They can't just jack up prices because they'd have to do it along their entire range of customers and it wouldn't stick.
Right now I can't get DSL but I can get T-1 service for $400/month. With 20 customers sharing it out, it would be well worth my while to do it, the last segment being handled wirelessly.
Their incentive to invest is that their privileged position can be stripped away via government action. If there is a public interest in competition and the roadblock is the Bell's stranglehold on the last mile of wiring which they got through govt. action, there's no reason the govt. can't just seize it and pay eminent domain compensation, leveling the playing field.
The problem has always been the 'last mile'. The solution is simple, if unnatural for technologists, partnerships with developers. If the point at which 'interior wiring' is terminated all ends up outside the houses and at one concentrated point, any subdivision of 100-200 houses can get competitive bids for the bandwidth necessary to run their telecommunications. You buy T-1s and break them out between voice and data needs or just go all digital with sip phones and converters for anybody who wants to hook up a legacy analog device.
Combine that with legislation that permits a reasonable buyout of existing wiring up to subdivision concentrators (perhaps through eminent domain) and you've created an entirely new area of viable competition, one without any legislation, one with reasonably easy to pass eminent domain rules. In essence, it's undoing the monopoly at its most pernicious, one neighborhood at a time. Even better, eminent domain is something *local* governments do and that's the level at which grass roots activism has its best shot at prevailing.
A month is one thing, three or five months is something else entirely. I'm guessing that *a lot* of people, mac users or not will be wanting PPC 970 based macs.
Not quite that soon. Apple has some serious bad history of product shortages and one of the nice things about 'the new apple' is that it doesn't happen as much as it used to.
IBM will start production and Apple may have internal machines running 64 bit versions of Mac OS X in a few months but they certainly aren't going to announce until they have a nice stack of machines waiting for the tidal wave of users to come at them.
I always wonder why university professors don't take working OSS projects and contribute code to them as class projects. It would be a tremendous improvement in the number of people looking at the code, classes that actually created useful work would have their members able to put something interesting in their resume, and the amount of useful software would increase.
He doesn't have to. There's a book that counts, lists, and describes them all. The last I checked, there was a version done by the same people for Mac as well (much thinner at the time). The way that they count is pretty much the way everybody else counts.
If you want to waste time educating the general public in a difference in units be my guest. It's a thankless task. For a good amount of time, Apple didn't count their AGP slot when they advertised their computer and people constantly dinged them for being 'less expandable' even though it makes little sense to count multiple types of slots together. Today Apple counts slots just like everybody else because they got tired of the thankless task of user education.
You have something of a point, but is it worth the effort to actually go through the thousands of Windows programs and determine uniqueness? Personally, I have better things to do with my life.
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According to the article, the 10k number came from a parliament member's question. If they're lying, it's likely a felony.
Size matters in that Intel can bring more money to bear on a problem than most of their competitors. That isn't really true for IBM who have massive fab operations building all sorts of chips, thus giving them an economy of scale that other Intel competitors simply don't have. They also maintain larger capacity by renting out some of their fab lines to people like AMD as well as true fabless chip design houses.
IBM is a huge, widely diversified company whose large chip fabricating facilities are arguably the best in the industry and certainly spend at least an appreciable percentage of the time with the best fab tech crown. They also have a reputation for quick and efficient execution, something that has been a problem for companies like AMD and Motorola in the past.
Furthermore, as a services company with a huge presence in major businesses and with govt. accounts all over the world they have the ear of purchasing managers everywhere. There's likely to be a major marketing catfight between Intel arguing that the P4 is the appropriate comparison and trying to maintain the effectiveness of Mhz=speed campaign against Apple and IBM who will gleefully set up comparisons puncturing that idea.
Intel doesn't have too many fools in its higher echelons. I'm sure they've got an appropriate pucker factor going.
AT&T did not give permission for anybody to connect non-AT&T equipment to their network. IBM didn't give permission to connect non-IBM front end processors to their mainframes. Heck, IBM didn't give permission to anybody to clone their machines either.
Would telephone competition, mainframe competition, or the PC market ever have developed without competitors reverse engineering and elbowing their way into the market?
According to the stock market IBM has a larger market cap than Intel. IBM often wins the title of most patents filed in the past year. Is this a worry for Intel? I think so, especially if IBM can make the claim that the press should be comparing clock speeds to the 1Ghz Itanium and not the 3 Ghz P4.
The PPC 970 is a 64 bit chip. It would be proper (IMO) to compare it to Intel's 64 bit solution the Itanium 2
According to Intel.com, Itanium 2 has a top speed of 1.0Ghz. The PPC 970 is likely going to be coming out in 6 months with a minimum speed of 1.8 Ghz and a max speed of 2.5Ghz.
Itanium 2 has a significant speed penalty running 32 bit code. PPC 970 has little to no speed penalty running 32 big code.
Actually what will turn Apple around will be things like offering servers that are cheaper than Windows and easier to operate (Xserve), creating a platform that runs more software than the competition, and provides more bang for your buck.
A simple chip speed up won't do it but these other things will.
So far, .mac has provided enough in freebie software that it's worth it.
The PPC 970 is a 64 bit processor. Wake me up when Intel makes a 64bit processor that cracks 2Ghz. Their current 'speed king' in 64 bits runs at 1Ghz. Look it up at Intel's website.
Oh, I don't know, in the 64 bit realm, a little speed comparison might be fun. In case you didn't know, Intel's fastest 64 bit chip is the Itanium 2 which ships at 900Mhz and 1Ghz speeds. Somehow I don't think they'll be hitting 2.5Ghz in the next 6 months.
I can't understand why so many insist on comparing Intel's 32 bit solutions to this chip which is a 64 bit solution. Intel ships a 64 bit solution too and I think that's the proper comparison.
Then again the max shipping speed on the Itanium 2 (Intel's fastest 64 bit chip) is 1Ghz.
I think the days of selling computers based on Mhz just drew to a close.
In this case, it would be an Appleseed cluster surely.
The question is how hard is it to organize 15 of your neighbors into a WISP and get better bandwidth service plus wireless area coverage at the same monthly cost.
On Fullerton ave in Chicago. The haul is pretty short from their pop. I priced that out for my church and we ended up running DSL business service with SBC and 5 static IPs. We're going to run some small services and try to make enough money to 'graduate' to a T-1 and then set up a WISP and really get some cash flow going.
For my house which is further out in the 'burbs, it's $700.
Get a T-1 and share it with your neighbors via wireless.
How cheap does that backhaul have to be? T-1s are dropping in price and have been for years.
There's a difference between business and rent seeking. One's honorable, the other is not. Influencing/buying politicians to keep your business model profitable is not acceptable.
Essentially the problem is that the point at which we cease to own our telecom wiring is long before the wires are concentrated to a point where it would be practical for competitors to deliver service. If the demarcation point was simply moved from your exterior wall to the subdivision concentrator or the CO, we wouldn't be in this mess.
As T-1 prices drift lower and lower, won't more people just band together and share T's? The entire business community uses these lines and they are in a competitive market with lots of sellers there. They can't just jack up prices because they'd have to do it along their entire range of customers and it wouldn't stick.
Right now I can't get DSL but I can get T-1 service for $400/month. With 20 customers sharing it out, it would be well worth my while to do it, the last segment being handled wirelessly.
Their incentive to invest is that their privileged position can be stripped away via government action. If there is a public interest in competition and the roadblock is the Bell's stranglehold on the last mile of wiring which they got through govt. action, there's no reason the govt. can't just seize it and pay eminent domain compensation, leveling the playing field.
The problem has always been the 'last mile'. The solution is simple, if unnatural for technologists, partnerships with developers. If the point at which 'interior wiring' is terminated all ends up outside the houses and at one concentrated point, any subdivision of 100-200 houses can get competitive bids for the bandwidth necessary to run their telecommunications. You buy T-1s and break them out between voice and data needs or just go all digital with sip phones and converters for anybody who wants to hook up a legacy analog device.
Combine that with legislation that permits a reasonable buyout of existing wiring up to subdivision concentrators (perhaps through eminent domain) and you've created an entirely new area of viable competition, one without any legislation, one with reasonably easy to pass eminent domain rules. In essence, it's undoing the monopoly at its most pernicious, one neighborhood at a time. Even better, eminent domain is something *local* governments do and that's the level at which grass roots activism has its best shot at prevailing.
A month is one thing, three or five months is something else entirely. I'm guessing that *a lot* of people, mac users or not will be wanting PPC 970 based macs.
Not quite that soon. Apple has some serious bad history of product shortages and one of the nice things about 'the new apple' is that it doesn't happen as much as it used to.
IBM will start production and Apple may have internal machines running 64 bit versions of Mac OS X in a few months but they certainly aren't going to announce until they have a nice stack of machines waiting for the tidal wave of users to come at them.
I always wonder why university professors don't take working OSS projects and contribute code to them as class projects. It would be a tremendous improvement in the number of people looking at the code, classes that actually created useful work would have their members able to put something interesting in their resume, and the amount of useful software would increase.
He doesn't have to. There's a book that counts, lists, and describes them all. The last I checked, there was a version done by the same people for Mac as well (much thinner at the time). The way that they count is pretty much the way everybody else counts.
If you want to waste time educating the general public in a difference in units be my guest. It's a thankless task. For a good amount of time, Apple didn't count their AGP slot when they advertised their computer and people constantly dinged them for being 'less expandable' even though it makes little sense to count multiple types of slots together. Today Apple counts slots just like everybody else because they got tired of the thankless task of user education.
You have something of a point, but is it worth the effort to actually go through the thousands of Windows programs and determine uniqueness? Personally, I have better things to do with my life.