Maybe Vannevar Bush's prediction of giant electronic brains wasn't so far fetched?? It just is showing up in a different form from the giant skyscraper towers he predicted.
It seems like the progression towards centralized computer a la mainframes is trying to make its way back.
And AMD is still shooting blanks at the year old Intel Q6600 which has hit the $200 mark on various deal sites. Even the AMD quads have their hands full against the old Kentsfield Q6600.
Very good article but while I think AMD will still matter, its not in the best position of the three. The article mostly goes over AMD's technology and strategy advantage but glosses over financials.
AMD is highly leveraged with ountains of debt. The article glossed over it but the fact of the matter is AMD is highly leveraged has $5 billion dollars of debt and only $1 billion of cash. AMD unsecured debt bonds are now rated CCC, junk turf. And the other wammy is with capital liquidity so damn low in the current credit crisis, its hard to see how AMD can secure any sort of money. Its also poised to report a 238 million dollar loss for this quarter and just cut quite a bit of staff.
Intel is kicking some butt right now. Take a look at this very recent report:
Intel beat reassures tech sector. Tech bellwether Intel (INTC) posted EPS of $0.28 ($0.04 better than $0.25 consensus) on revenue of $9.67B (in line), and issued an upbeat Q2 outlook that sent its shares soaring +7.3% in extended trading. Unlike many other firms, Intel said strong sales (+9.3%) were driven by North American demand, particularly for servers. CEO Paul Otellini said Intel is not seeing any effects from U.S. economic weakness, a sharp contrast to recent remarks by rival AMD (AMD) which told of widely weaker-than-forecast Q1 sales. For Q2, Intel sees revenue of $9-9.6B (vs. $9.26B consensus) and gross margins of 56% (vs. 53.6% this quarter). NAND flash memory chips revenue continued to flag.
AMD is also losing a ton of its market share it gained from the Athlon 64/Opteron days in the server market. I believe its down to about 23% now.
Now from a strategic standpoint, I'll take a slightly different view than the Pcper paper. I believe its a case right now of Sun Tzu's maxim: "he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak." In other words, AMD has an alright GPU solution but has been second fiddle to Nvidia except for a brief upturn during the old Radeon 9700/9500/9600 series days. And ever since Core 2, Intel has proven it didn't need a serial interconnect Hypertransport (yet) and an onboard memory controller to be faster than the Athlons of those days. With Nehelem, it will get both and will be a force to be reckoned with.
I believe that AMD sat on its laurels too long during the Athlon 64 generation. It introduced the A64 series in mid 2003 and basically took over the lead with its performance and power effieciency. It even had the early lead with dual cores (remember the 3800 X2?) But it got bogged down with the ATI buyout and Intel basically landed a surprise attack with Core 2. AMD got caught with its pants down until early 2008 with the release of Phenom which for all intents and purposes only matches Conroe and surpassed by Penryn in both speed and wattage use.
Even Nvidia, while as the article said, has a strategic position problem still has a mound of cash reserves as does Intel. Granted the losing market share of PC gaming will hurt Nvidia, it still has some maneuver room. From my perspective, Intel is in smooth sailing for at least another year.
While I for the most part think wire sound the same or very very close, there are some fairly well known speaker designers who would disagree. Take a look at this thread:
For anyone buying a new system (like myself), its a great time in terms of CPU pricing. With Intel's price cuts, you can get a quad core chip in the $300 range!
Add to that incredibly low memory prices and incredibly low HDD prices and you can piece together something fast and cheap with little cash.
Unfortunately, the mid-range graphics market for DX10 parts isn't up to par with the rest of the parts. There is a void between $125 and $260. The geforce 8600GT is the $125 part, which is ok, and the 8800GTS is in the $260 range. The 8600GTS is about the same speed as a 7900GT, give or take, and in the $150-$200 range. Being that previous generation midrange cards did very well against their high end predecessors, this is not the best generation of cards. The new AMD/ATI offerings are both worse than the nvidia ones, so thats no help at all.
Cool, another devs fan on the board!
We could really use the captain right now, not that Elias isn't a good player but the team seems to be missing its heart.
Lets not forget that there are lots of different types of studio monitors each with their own characteristics. A Mackie will sound different than a KRK will sound different than a Dynaudio monitor.
Studio monitors are usually thought of as "the most accurate" but again, isn't that what 95% of hifi speakers try to do? The bottom line is there no such thing as perfect frequency or transients in the real world. Its just not possible. Take into consideration room shape, wall reflections, let alone the characteristics of crossovers, drivers, etc and you'll quickly figure out that "ruler flat response" doesn't exist. That overly crisp, sharp sound some monitors have alot of times is a bit of a hump in the upper ranges which is definately not perfect.
And I'll quote a Mr. Jay_WJ from an audio speaker forum:
Here's a sort of mathematical description of this situation:
Suppose that we have a certain loss function f(x), which measures the discrepancy between ideal flat FR and real system FR, given all possible design choices that are represented by x (possibly a vector of variables). As we know, the f(x) cannot attain 0 discrepancy. It is plausible (actually almost always occurs in real-world optimization problems) that we can have similarly close-to-zero values at different x points. In this case, different disign choices result in similar losses. But suppose that an empirical study with real listeners finds that a particular x satisfies more people than another x point. This means that even if multiple design choices lead to a similarly low loss (i.e., in this case similarly "flat response"), a particular one can satisfy more people than another.
We can conclude that since there's no such as perfect accuracy, it doesn't matter which gear you use as long as its designed well. Now room treatments on the other hand will definately improve things.
As in most things engineered, there is always a compromise. There is no such thing as best in the car world, as you alluded to. The Porsche 911 is a great car no doubt, but it too is a compromise. Hell, its even more complicated than that.
Performance.. do you mean 0-60? Top speed? Handling? Steering feedback? 0-60 maybe the Bugatti Veyron or McClaren F1, same with top speed (unless your talking built for racing cars). Handling could go to quite a few cars from the Porsche Cayman to the Lotus Exige.
Maybe best to a person means size. In that case, a Ford Excursion wins.
Maybe its prestige. Then you probably want a Bentley. Or Rolls Royce. Or Maybach.
Maybe its reliability in which case thats probably a Toyota/Lexus product.
Maybe its price. Then a Kia or Hyundai would do.
There's a good possibility that you want a combination of things. For most of us its reliability and price. Most of us except the ultra-wealthy do care about this. This is why we "only" buy Mercedes for prestige but the cost of a Bentley is just not doable. Or we "only" buy a Mustang when we really wanted an upper performer like a Ferrari or Lambo.
Now we can apply this to security products. What combination of qualities do we require? Maybe we want to give up a little encryption effectiveness for higher throughput in a firewall. Or we want super-secure encryption but don't care about the speed. Maybe its a certain amount of features that we need... ok.. lets give up a little encryption for that in this product. OK, maybe we can't afford product X, so pricing is a factor too so we get a less capable version of what we want cheaper like the Mustang example. I'm not a security product expert by any means, but I think this illustrates this idea of compromise when factoring "the best".
Looking at the some of the threads here, I notice people bemoaning the price of good audio equipment or that audiophiles are suckers. But thanks to the burgeoning world of internet direct audio equipment, you can get good sound on the cheap. Cheap being even $200 for a very good pair of stereo speakers with amp. I won't name brands unless asked but for instance I just bought a pair of $200 speakers that can hold its own against some pricier competition (yes, this is the ultimate cliche in stereo reviews!). Why do I say that though? The parts inside, the drivers, crossovers, cabinets are a lot nicer than what you can get retail. That much is a fact. Frequency and impedance plots back this up.
I agree with you there. I think people, even media like here, mix up network management and network monitoring. I never used OpenNMS, but it looks more like something like NetCool (which was acquired by tivoli after I left the field). Or even TEC in some ways... remember TEC? Ugh.
I was a Tivoli implementer back in the day as well. Tivoli is not the competition, rather the NetView portion of Tivoli is. I don't think this product is supposed to do the desktop management side of things like remote control, SD, or inventory.
The Ferraris are definately top of the line when it comes to styling. Other than that, there are quite a bit of machines with better specs at 15.4". Asus makes some of the best speced machines. As of right now, the best specced 15.4" notebook would probably be the Asus G1 gaming notebook with its Geforce Go 7700 with 512mb, Core 2 Duo T7400, 2 gigs ram, and optional 7200rpm drive. Go to a 17" machine and it would probably be the Dell XPS 1710 with its Geforce Go 7900. Asus also have the 14.1" A8JS with the 7700 and 512mb of RAM, probably the fastest of the 14.1"ers.
I just came back from an ISV event for Vista training for developers and its now currently in the "touchdown" phase. All the trainers and our "platform evangelist" has hinted at late this year for us (ISV partners) and early next for normal consumers. We did some quick code snippets in WinFX(.NET 3.0) and the new UI and communications improvements were pretty cool.
This is a great comment and I absolutely agree with it. Being on top, one can come up with a hundred reasons why you're there. Trouble is are those reasons the cause or rewards of being there?
I do have a CCNA already, along with Tivoli Framework, and some Microsoft development certs (I'm a full time.NET coder). So are you saying I should get more hardware and network related certs before looking? It just seems like those low level jobs don't exist in the security field. I've been thinking maybe I have to find a junior level network/admin job before I could make the leap to security.
What exactly is the best way to break into security (pun intended)? It seems no entry or junior level jobs exist in the field. I'd love to work in the field, but my background is mostly systems management and development.
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Maybe Vannevar Bush's prediction of giant electronic brains wasn't so far fetched?? It just is showing up in a different form from the giant skyscraper towers he predicted. It seems like the progression towards centralized computer a la mainframes is trying to make its way back.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/01/woefully-misleading-piece-on-value-at.html
In summary, the NY Times piece has basic assumptions of how VaR works all wrong specifically that the models assume normal distributions.
And AMD is still shooting blanks at the year old Intel Q6600 which has hit the $200 mark on various deal sites. Even the AMD quads have their hands full against the old Kentsfield Q6600.
AMD is highly leveraged with ountains of debt. The article glossed over it but the fact of the matter is AMD is highly leveraged has $5 billion dollars of debt and only $1 billion of cash. AMD unsecured debt bonds are now rated CCC, junk turf. And the other wammy is with capital liquidity so damn low in the current credit crisis, its hard to see how AMD can secure any sort of money. Its also poised to report a 238 million dollar loss for this quarter and just cut quite a bit of staff.
Intel is kicking some butt right now. Take a look at this very recent report:
Intel beat reassures tech sector. Tech bellwether Intel (INTC) posted EPS of $0.28 ($0.04 better than $0.25 consensus) on revenue of $9.67B (in line), and issued an upbeat Q2 outlook that sent its shares soaring +7.3% in extended trading. Unlike many other firms, Intel said strong sales (+9.3%) were driven by North American demand, particularly for servers. CEO Paul Otellini said Intel is not seeing any effects from U.S. economic weakness, a sharp contrast to recent remarks by rival AMD (AMD) which told of widely weaker-than-forecast Q1 sales. For Q2, Intel sees revenue of $9-9.6B (vs. $9.26B consensus) and gross margins of 56% (vs. 53.6% this quarter). NAND flash memory chips revenue continued to flag.
AMD is also losing a ton of its market share it gained from the Athlon 64/Opteron days in the server market. I believe its down to about 23% now.
Now from a strategic standpoint, I'll take a slightly different view than the Pcper paper. I believe its a case right now of Sun Tzu's maxim: "he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak." In other words, AMD has an alright GPU solution but has been second fiddle to Nvidia except for a brief upturn during the old Radeon 9700/9500/9600 series days. And ever since Core 2, Intel has proven it didn't need a serial interconnect Hypertransport (yet) and an onboard memory controller to be faster than the Athlons of those days. With Nehelem, it will get both and will be a force to be reckoned with.
I believe that AMD sat on its laurels too long during the Athlon 64 generation. It introduced the A64 series in mid 2003 and basically took over the lead with its performance and power effieciency. It even had the early lead with dual cores (remember the 3800 X2?) But it got bogged down with the ATI buyout and Intel basically landed a surprise attack with Core 2. AMD got caught with its pants down until early 2008 with the release of Phenom which for all intents and purposes only matches Conroe and surpassed by Penryn in both speed and wattage use.
Even Nvidia, while as the article said, has a strategic position problem still has a mound of cash reserves as does Intel. Granted the losing market share of PC gaming will hurt Nvidia, it still has some maneuver room. From my perspective, Intel is in smooth sailing for at least another year.
I can replace my von schweikert vr4 jrs wiiiith.. an end table!
http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13377&page=12
I own two of Danny's designs and he's pretty well versed and well known in the speaker design industry.
It must have been mid-90s. I don't know the price at release, but I remember buying one at about $500 from Insight in computer shopper.
Add to that incredibly low memory prices and incredibly low HDD prices and you can piece together something fast and cheap with little cash.
Unfortunately, the mid-range graphics market for DX10 parts isn't up to par with the rest of the parts. There is a void between $125 and $260. The geforce 8600GT is the $125 part, which is ok, and the 8800GTS is in the $260 range. The 8600GTS is about the same speed as a 7900GT, give or take, and in the $150-$200 range. Being that previous generation midrange cards did very well against their high end predecessors, this is not the best generation of cards. The new AMD/ATI offerings are both worse than the nvidia ones, so thats no help at all.
when the world trembled at the shound of our rocketsh. They will tremble again at the shound of our shilence. The order is engage the shilent drive!
Cool, another devs fan on the board! We could really use the captain right now, not that Elias isn't a good player but the team seems to be missing its heart.
Studio monitors are usually thought of as "the most accurate" but again, isn't that what 95% of hifi speakers try to do? The bottom line is there no such thing as perfect frequency or transients in the real world. Its just not possible. Take into consideration room shape, wall reflections, let alone the characteristics of crossovers, drivers, etc and you'll quickly figure out that "ruler flat response" doesn't exist. That overly crisp, sharp sound some monitors have alot of times is a bit of a hump in the upper ranges which is definately not perfect.
And I'll quote a Mr. Jay_WJ from an audio speaker forum:
Here's a sort of mathematical description of this situation: Suppose that we have a certain loss function f(x), which measures the discrepancy between ideal flat FR and real system FR, given all possible design choices that are represented by x (possibly a vector of variables). As we know, the f(x) cannot attain 0 discrepancy. It is plausible (actually almost always occurs in real-world optimization problems) that we can have similarly close-to-zero values at different x points. In this case, different disign choices result in similar losses. But suppose that an empirical study with real listeners finds that a particular x satisfies more people than another x point. This means that even if multiple design choices lead to a similarly low loss (i.e., in this case similarly "flat response"), a particular one can satisfy more people than another.Here is a link actually comparing 2 monitors and 2 hifi speakers. There is not as much difference as you think. Mostly one is built for near-field use, the other for farther out. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Jun02/articles/mon itors.asp
We can conclude that since there's no such as perfect accuracy, it doesn't matter which gear you use as long as its designed well. Now room treatments on the other hand will definately improve things.
As in most things engineered, there is always a compromise. There is no such thing as best in the car world, as you alluded to. The Porsche 911 is a great car no doubt, but it too is a compromise. Hell, its even more complicated than that.
Performance.. do you mean 0-60? Top speed? Handling? Steering feedback?
0-60 maybe the Bugatti Veyron or McClaren F1, same with top speed (unless your talking built for racing cars). Handling could go to quite a few cars from the Porsche Cayman to the Lotus Exige.
Maybe best to a person means size. In that case, a Ford Excursion wins.
Maybe its prestige. Then you probably want a Bentley. Or Rolls Royce. Or Maybach.
Maybe its reliability in which case thats probably a Toyota/Lexus product.
Maybe its price. Then a Kia or Hyundai would do.
There's a good possibility that you want a combination of things. For most of us its reliability and price. Most of us except the ultra-wealthy do care about this. This is why we "only" buy Mercedes for prestige but the cost of a Bentley is just not doable. Or we "only" buy a Mustang when we really wanted an upper performer like a Ferrari or Lambo.
Now we can apply this to security products. What combination of qualities do we require? Maybe we want to give up a little encryption effectiveness for higher throughput in a firewall. Or we want super-secure encryption but don't care about the speed. Maybe its a certain amount of features that we need... ok.. lets give up a little encryption for that in this product. OK, maybe we can't afford product X, so pricing is a factor too so we get a less capable version of what we want cheaper like the Mustang example. I'm not a security product expert by any means, but I think this illustrates this idea of compromise when factoring "the best".
Looking at the some of the threads here, I notice people bemoaning the price of good audio equipment or that audiophiles are suckers. But thanks to the burgeoning world of internet direct audio equipment, you can get good sound on the cheap. Cheap being even $200 for a very good pair of stereo speakers with amp. I won't name brands unless asked but for instance I just bought a pair of $200 speakers that can hold its own against some pricier competition (yes, this is the ultimate cliche in stereo reviews!). Why do I say that though? The parts inside, the drivers, crossovers, cabinets are a lot nicer than what you can get retail. That much is a fact. Frequency and impedance plots back this up.
And you do realize in TNG, the red shirt signifies "captain." Thats the Federation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H American dream right there, isn't it?!
That is a great looking laptop. I guess if thats a Ferrari, then I wonder what this is: http://usa.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=4251 Maybe a Le Mans race-spec Corvette?
I agree with you there. I think people, even media like here, mix up network management and network monitoring. I never used OpenNMS, but it looks more like something like NetCool (which was acquired by tivoli after I left the field). Or even TEC in some ways... remember TEC? Ugh.
I was a Tivoli implementer back in the day as well. Tivoli is not the competition, rather the NetView portion of Tivoli is. I don't think this product is supposed to do the desktop management side of things like remote control, SD, or inventory.
The Ferraris are definately top of the line when it comes to styling. Other than that, there are quite a bit of machines with better specs at 15.4". Asus makes some of the best speced machines. As of right now, the best specced 15.4" notebook would probably be the Asus G1 gaming notebook with its Geforce Go 7700 with 512mb, Core 2 Duo T7400, 2 gigs ram, and optional 7200rpm drive. Go to a 17" machine and it would probably be the Dell XPS 1710 with its Geforce Go 7900. Asus also have the 14.1" A8JS with the 7700 and 512mb of RAM, probably the fastest of the 14.1"ers.
the opposite of that would be this: http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/ap/2006/12/ 19/ap3269685.html
I don't think the majority of college kids know a thing about DJ Shadow, Aphex Twin, or Moby.
I just came back from an ISV event for Vista training for developers and its now currently in the "touchdown" phase. All the trainers and our "platform evangelist" has hinted at late this year for us (ISV partners) and early next for normal consumers. We did some quick code snippets in WinFX(.NET 3.0) and the new UI and communications improvements were pretty cool.
This is a great comment and I absolutely agree with it. Being on top, one can come up with a hundred reasons why you're there. Trouble is are those reasons the cause or rewards of being there?
I do have a CCNA already, along with Tivoli Framework, and some Microsoft development certs (I'm a full time .NET coder). So are you saying I should get more hardware and network related certs before looking? It just seems like those low level jobs don't exist in the security field. I've been thinking maybe I have to find a junior level network/admin job before I could make the leap to security.
What exactly is the best way to break into security (pun intended)? It seems no entry or junior level jobs exist in the field. I'd love to work in the field, but my background is mostly systems management and development.
Gotta admire their marketing if not their POS speakers.