Once again: Intel's purchase of Wind River on its own does nothing to increase or decrease the competition for sales of its processors. Anyone saying otherwise is speculating.
On its own, Intel's purchase of Wind River on its own does nothing to increase or decrease the competition for sales of its processors. Anyone saying otherwise is speculating.
You need to read up on the history of Microsoft and monopolies in general. This goes precisely to the point, and Microsoft found itself in court for exactly the same behaviors (using an achieved monopoly in one product or market to bully their way into dominance in another). In the instance of but the acquisition itself is irrelevant. It's why Intel is doing it and what they intend to do with it that makes it anti-competitive.
But they have not done anything yet; the acquisition in itself is not anticompetitive. Unless you have some other information, this is simply speculation in your part.
What exactly makes buying another company (which is not a competitor) anticompetitive?
What exactly does Intel's perceived monopoly in one market (desktop PC CPU) have to do with an acquisition in the unrelated embedded operating system market?
There's a Youtube vid of a Honda Insight (hybrid) being driven very gently on an out of town road, windows up, no air conditioning, in econo mode, etc.etc. Basically every little thing they could do to get every inch out of the fuel they're using. Got 67 MPG. If I drive my Impala - which is not hybrid, probably twice the weight, and with the frontal area of a barn door compared to the Honda - in the same manner, at the same speed, I can easily break 50MPG. Somewhere around 53, depending on traffic; which the Honda didn't have to deal with. If I can do 53, and the Honda can only do 67 with all the advantages it's got....that's pretty pathetic.
How are you measuring? You mentioned below you are using instantaneous readouts. Are your numbers accurate?
The advantage of a hybrid electric/gas vehicle isn't that it is more efficient when traveling at a constant speed on a flat road - it's that the electric system stores energy that would otherwise be wasted and reuses it.
Anyway, 67 instantaneous mpg is nothing. I get infinite MPG in my car... in the right conditions (decelerating downhill at 45 mph or more) and for the duration of these conditions only. But don't pay any attention to the fuel used to get up the hill...
My car doesn't magically start moving at 60 mph without using any fuel when I turn the key, and I can't drive down a hill to go everywhere, so this is rather meaningless.
A meaningful measurement considers fuel usage over an entire trip. A meaningful comparison considers the conditions as well. Is it misleading to compare a hybrid's fuel economy on a 5 mile trip at 0F to a non-hybrid's fuel economy on a 20 mile trip at 60F without disclosing the length of the trip & outside temperature? Most certainly.
On a different note, doesn't a 9800 require a power hook-up
Not all of them.
and isn't the suggested minimum PowerSupply 400W?
The power supply suggestion on any part is an arbitrary decision by the manufacturer. Its main function is to keep people who don't know better from buying parts that won't work - the assumption being that any power supply advertised as "400" or "500" W will be good enough.
And if you're putting a Blu-Ray and a TV Tuner, aren't you going to need a larger PS?
You're going to power a dual core processor and a 9800 gt graphics card along with all the other hardware on a 300 watt PSU? Riiiight. Good luck getting it to run stable.
"require a 500W PSU" is an arbitrary suggestion.
The nVidia reference version of the 9800 GT has a maximum draw of 105 W. Newer cards (possibly with 55nm instead of 65nm GPUs) are likely to use less.
See here. The system seems to use desktop PC parts, not mobile parts: a motherboard with an nVidia chipset, a LGA 775 CPU, DDR2 memory, a micro ATX power supply. The system is using Intel desktop CPUs with 65 W TDP and a motherboard with integrated graphics. I would expect a system using a mobile CPU and chipset to use less power.
The "greenest gaming PC" would be a system using a mobile CPU and chipset (and possibly a full desktop GPU) - something similar to the iMac's hardware, perhaps.
I'm not saying all funding is used inappropriately, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot is. Since when is corruption or abuse of funding a surprise? I could cite plenty of examples of that happening with all sorts of gov't funding. I'm trying not to imply that we should abolish taxes, and I agree it would come from another source otherwise. So what then? what is the solution to either a legitimate or illegitimate lack of funding due to these taxes then? I think focusing on efficiency as opposed to alternative sources to increase funding would probably go longer.
This isn't really a case where you can only wonder if the money is being used efficiently. You should do some research on the local level... you can often find what projects are up for bid, how much money is spent on a project, where the money came from, etc. This kind of information is all available online in my area. My local paper writes about area transportation projects often.
I've driven on some results of wasted highway funding - roads that have to be repaired because they weren't constructed properly, four-lane highways that have very little traffic and no homes/businesses alongside, etc. But at least roads are paid for by the users, and road funding is being wasted on transportation projects.
I'm barely a democrat and more a moderate, moreso because we don't have any other party that seems to debate using actual logic. See two sides well debated and I will support whoever uses logic and makes the btter argument.
Meanwhile, we have taxes for streets, etc. Ever heard of tollbooths? Ever heard of city taxes?
We do have taxes for streets, etc. They are called fuel taxes and vehicle registration taxes.
Without an electronic tracking system, tolls are only feasible on highways.
Local taxes may provide road funding in some cases, but these come out of general funds - so taxpayers do not pay for highways according to usage. Imagine a city with heavy usage of mass transit - should all its residents be equally responsible for funding that city's roads, or should those who use the roads fund those roads? (Where I live, we actually subsidize mass transit using sales tax - yet no sales, real estate, or income tax goes towards roads.)
You really think the funds *havent* been misappropriated?
For complaining about a lack of logic, you seem to employ emotional arguments quite a bit. You have provided no evidence that fuel tax revenues are misappropriated, or even asserted that you think it is; just a suspicion.
My state publishes the distribution of motor fuel taxes as well as the projects it is funding. Local governments also publish information on the projects they fund. They also publish where the money to fund the projects came from. And in my area, most of the funding for highway and road projects comes from fuel taxes and registration fees.
$0.184/gal is the United States federal government gas tax. I did not argue that there were no other taxes on fuel, and did not want to make an argument specific to one state.
Whether it "sounds like a small amount" is an emotional argument and does not take into account the factors that should be used to make a rational decision: how the collected funds are allocated. I'm arguing that these fuel taxes are not unreasonable because they primarily fund the government services used by vehicles - roads.
In my state, fuel taxes go towards highway and transportation funding. In my county, no money is taken from real estate or sales taxes to fund roads - it comes from vehicle registration and fuel taxes.
If these fuel taxes were lower or didn't exist, either highway funding would come from some other source (one not directly tied to usage) or less services would be offered.
Really, 15 cents sounds like small amounts, but so did the original 3% or whatever for taxing gasoline. Now about 1/4 of gasoline cost is tax. How's that working out? Money well spent?
Yes, gasoline taxes are well-spent. In the US, a significant portion of highway funding comes from fuel taxes - so the funding to build and maintain roads is proportional to the use (at the state and federal level.)
$0.00 of the US's $0.184/gal gasoline tax goes to the general fund - $0.0286/gal goes towards mass transit, and $0.001/gal goes towards a fund for leaking underground storage tanks. The rest goes towards the highway account.
Also, it is possible that gas taxes were increased over time in order to decrease taxes on other auto related items (such as tires, oil, vehicle registration.)
When these taxes were first imposed, we did not have the Interstate Highway System - a development of the 1950s. Today, this system connects the continental US. In fact, one might argue that increasing the gas tax had the effect of lowering the total cost of long trips (assuming highways can be used.)
Actually yes...at least on the phone thing, most everywhere taxes phone service. At least, according to any bill I've ever had for a phone, landline or cell.
But these taxes are typically allocated to:
government services provided via phone (such as 911)
Every modern browser does this. And they do this because a long time ago, people were serving simpler/crippled versions of their web pages to browsers other than Netscape.
Running LTS is not a good option when the old kernel is incompatible with your hardware and there's no easy way to use the driver until someone backports it.
Windows 2000 is nine years old and is no longer supported. On the other hand, you can use Windows XP and easily install drivers for your hardware - and you don't need to wait for backports, either. I've had problems running hardware on nine month old Linux distributions - Unless someone backports a driver or makes it easy to compile for older kernels (Intel NIC drivers are easy to compile), I have to upgrade.
"It's an unofficial beta" is always a poor excuse, especially when the problem is identified before the release and the installation media isn't updated after the "unofficial beta" supposedly ends
Surely some of the few systems tested have Intel graphics. After all, they account for nearly half of the PC graphics market.
Linux may be develoed by a small group, but Ubuntu specifically is being marketed as something that should "just work". Furhermore, the alpha/beta releases are tested by many.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise tend to have a decent amount of (server) support from hardware vendors. Both distributions have long lifecycles - they provide support (including updates) for many years after the release. They strive to maintain binary compatibility within a release - they do not change the major versions of that version's components. Modules compiled for a RHEL or SLES kernel should generally work with the newer patches of that kernel version.
As a result, each major version uses one version of the Linux kernel and the vendors patch it throughout the lifecycle. The latest version of RHEL (5) is using a highly patched 2.6.18 - and many of the patches are driver backports. (There are over 2000 patches in total.)
After experiencing a few hardware support regressions (Intel graphics, audio working better with 2.6.18 than 2.6.27, audio working better with the open source and third-party OSS), and after having to upgrade the operating system on perfectly working systems because the old version was not getting necessary bug fixes or security updates, I've generally given up on anything that has a short support lifecycle - no more Debian, no more regular Ubuntu releases, no more Fedora. I only run these distributions in virtual environments, and only when they for things that aren't important.
If you buy used CDs for $1 each, do you pay taxes on the $1 price or on the original retail value? If you record FM radio on a cassette player, do you pay taxes based on how much the songs would have cost to buy on a casette tape? If you record a song from Internet radio on your computer, do you pay tax based on the cost for the radio service to license that song and transmit it to you? If you download the 30 second sample of a 3 minute song, do you pay tax on 1/6th of the purchase price?
A big, ugly problem, true to be told. I would characterize it as being comparable to the "Vista Capable" Intel graphics performance issue. Why did that happen, and what prevents it from happening again?
The "Vista Capable" issue is nothing compared to this. Only one chipset (915G/915GM) was falsely marketed - at Vista's release, it was two generations old and found primarily in low-end budget systems.
I have a 915GM system, and graphics acceleration still works in Vista - there's just no Aero support. On this system, I can play a video in YouTube without any graphics problems. I can't do this on a 945GM system running Ubuntu 9.04.
Except for the GMA 500, which is used in a few netbooks, the Linux regression affects nearly all of Intel's recent IGPs - including the 915GM found in four year old systems, the G(M)45 found in brand new systems with Intel graphics, and the low-power version of the older 945GM chipset found in many netbooks.
Seriously. With Ubuntu now in a "just works" state on most hardware, and Android tested by commercial entities to work out-of-the-box fro specific hardware, there is real choice. The lower cost of slick Linux devices and PCs compared to OS X premium hardware from Apple will start to take hold this year.
Intel holds nearly 50% of the PC graphics market share. It's tough to say that it "just works" when nearly half of the latest hardware has broken graphics support - including the nearly all of the netbooks that Linux is supposed to be so great for. I find it troubling that they shipped an OS that broke graphics performance on so many systems - why did this happen now, and what prevents it from happening again?
...as long as it's Intel x86 or x86-64... Microsoft and Intel are like a evil couple
Windows NT was once released for MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC and was going to be ported to SPARC by a third party. Only the Alpha port sold well enough to justify development, and then Alpha was discontinued before Windows 2000 was released.
Right clicks shoudn't be used by a page usability-wise...
Thanks for that, but this is how the uTorrent UI works. The WebUI mimics the Windows UI's functionality, so it's an interactive JavaScript application (using XMLHttpRequest) rather than a set of web pages.
Possibly weird feel of UI? I remember it was really an issue at the beginning - Opera uses its own UI toolkit, with a bit different feel (I don't mean look!) than most UIs; not slower btw, quite the contrary.
Opera uses Qt on Linux. On Windows, it uses Win32 widgets and on OS X, it uses Carbon. In my opinion, Opera on Windows fits in visually better than Firefox.
On one Ubuntu 9.04 system, Opera 9 is considerably more responsive for me than the included version of Firefox - when using FreeNX, a remote desktop system. The only Firefox addon in use is for mouse gestures.
Opera certainly looks out of place with the standard skin on Ubuntu's Gnome desktop, but it looks better when using KDE. I could also take the time to make it use another Qt engine if I wanted.
I love Opera's speed. And I can live with the bloated features no one uses like Email and BitTorrent. But the sad fact is, a lot of sites don't work the same in Opera. I remember in particular that the uTorrent web GUI's Javascript didn't work at all.
I've been using the uTorrent WebUI in Opera for years; for it to work properly, you need to figure out how to keep Opera from intercepting right clicks. I forget how I did that.
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Corporations don't have feelings. Multinational corporations do not make decisions based on patriotism.
Once again: Intel's purchase of Wind River on its own does nothing to increase or decrease the competition for sales of its processors. Anyone saying otherwise is speculating.
On its own, Intel's purchase of Wind River on its own does nothing to increase or decrease the competition for sales of its processors. Anyone saying otherwise is speculating.
But they have not done anything yet; the acquisition in itself is not anticompetitive. Unless you have some other information, this is simply speculation in your part.
What exactly makes buying another company (which is not a competitor) anticompetitive?
What exactly does Intel's perceived monopoly in one market (desktop PC CPU) have to do with an acquisition in the unrelated embedded operating system market?
No, and a quick visit to Wikipedia would have cleared things up for you. Windows CE targets x86 as well.
How are you measuring? You mentioned below you are using instantaneous readouts. Are your numbers accurate?
The advantage of a hybrid electric/gas vehicle isn't that it is more efficient when traveling at a constant speed on a flat road - it's that the electric system stores energy that would otherwise be wasted and reuses it.
Anyway, 67 instantaneous mpg is nothing. I get infinite MPG in my car... in the right conditions (decelerating downhill at 45 mph or more) and for the duration of these conditions only. But don't pay any attention to the fuel used to get up the hill...
My car doesn't magically start moving at 60 mph without using any fuel when I turn the key, and I can't drive down a hill to go everywhere, so this is rather meaningless.
A meaningful measurement considers fuel usage over an entire trip. A meaningful comparison considers the conditions as well. Is it misleading to compare a hybrid's fuel economy on a 5 mile trip at 0F to a non-hybrid's fuel economy on a 20 mile trip at 60F without disclosing the length of the trip & outside temperature? Most certainly.
Not all of them.
The power supply suggestion on any part is an arbitrary decision by the manufacturer. Its main function is to keep people who don't know better from buying parts that won't work - the assumption being that any power supply advertised as "400" or "500" W will be good enough.
No.
"require a 500W PSU" is an arbitrary suggestion.
The nVidia reference version of the 9800 GT has a maximum draw of 105 W. Newer cards (possibly with 55nm instead of 65nm GPUs) are likely to use less.
See here. The system seems to use desktop PC parts, not mobile parts: a motherboard with an nVidia chipset, a LGA 775 CPU, DDR2 memory, a micro ATX power supply. The system is using Intel desktop CPUs with 65 W TDP and a motherboard with integrated graphics. I would expect a system using a mobile CPU and chipset to use less power.
The "greenest gaming PC" would be a system using a mobile CPU and chipset (and possibly a full desktop GPU) - something similar to the iMac's hardware, perhaps.
This isn't really a case where you can only wonder if the money is being used efficiently.
You should do some research on the local level... you can often find what projects are up for bid, how much money is spent on a project, where the money came from, etc. This kind of information is all available online in my area. My local paper writes about area transportation projects often.
I've driven on some results of wasted highway funding - roads that have to be repaired because they weren't constructed properly, four-lane highways that have very little traffic and no homes/businesses alongside, etc. But at least roads are paid for by the users, and road funding is being wasted on transportation projects.
We do have taxes for streets, etc. They are called fuel taxes and vehicle registration taxes.
Without an electronic tracking system, tolls are only feasible on highways.
Local taxes may provide road funding in some cases, but these come out of general funds - so taxpayers do not pay for highways according to usage. Imagine a city with heavy usage of mass transit - should all its residents be equally responsible for funding that city's roads, or should those who use the roads fund those roads? (Where I live, we actually subsidize mass transit using sales tax - yet no sales, real estate, or income tax goes towards roads.)
For complaining about a lack of logic, you seem to employ emotional arguments quite a bit. You have provided no evidence that fuel tax revenues are misappropriated, or even asserted that you think it is; just a suspicion.
My state publishes the distribution of motor fuel taxes as well as the projects it is funding. Local governments also publish information on the projects they fund. They also publish where the money to fund the projects came from. And in my area, most of the funding for highway and road projects comes from fuel taxes and registration fees.
$0.184/gal is the United States federal government gas tax. I did not argue that there were no other taxes on fuel, and did not want to make an argument specific to one state.
Whether it "sounds like a small amount" is an emotional argument and does not take into account the factors that should be used to make a rational decision: how the collected funds are allocated. I'm arguing that these fuel taxes are not unreasonable because they primarily fund the government services used by vehicles - roads.
In my state, fuel taxes go towards highway and transportation funding. In my county, no money is taken from real estate or sales taxes to fund roads - it comes from vehicle registration and fuel taxes.
If these fuel taxes were lower or didn't exist, either highway funding would come from some other source (one not directly tied to usage) or less services would be offered.
Yes, gasoline taxes are well-spent. In the US, a significant portion of highway funding comes from fuel taxes - so the funding to build and maintain roads is proportional to the use (at the state and federal level.)
$0.00 of the US's $0.184/gal gasoline tax goes to the general fund - $0.0286/gal goes towards mass transit, and $0.001/gal goes towards a fund for leaking underground storage tanks. The rest goes towards the highway account.
Also, it is possible that gas taxes were increased over time in order to decrease taxes on other auto related items (such as tires, oil, vehicle registration.)
When these taxes were first imposed, we did not have the Interstate Highway System - a development of the 1950s. Today, this system connects the continental US. In fact, one might argue that increasing the gas tax had the effect of lowering the total cost of long trips (assuming highways can be used.)
More information
But these taxes are typically allocated to:
Every modern browser does this. And they do this because a long time ago, people were serving simpler/crippled versions of their web pages to browsers other than Netscape.
Running LTS is not a good option when the old kernel is incompatible with your hardware and there's no easy way to use the driver until someone backports it.
Windows 2000 is nine years old and is no longer supported. On the other hand, you can use Windows XP and easily install drivers for your hardware - and you don't need to wait for backports, either. I've had problems running hardware on nine month old Linux distributions - Unless someone backports a driver or makes it easy to compile for older kernels (Intel NIC drivers are easy to compile), I have to upgrade.
"It's an unofficial beta" is always a poor excuse, especially when the problem is identified before the release and the installation media isn't updated after the "unofficial beta" supposedly ends
Surely some of the few systems tested have Intel graphics. After all, they account for nearly half of the PC graphics market.
Linux may be develoed by a small group, but Ubuntu specifically is being marketed as something that should "just work". Furhermore, the alpha/beta releases are tested by many.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise tend to have a decent amount of (server) support from hardware vendors. Both distributions have long lifecycles - they provide support (including updates) for many years after the release. They strive to maintain binary compatibility within a release - they do not change the major versions of that version's components. Modules compiled for a RHEL or SLES kernel should generally work with the newer patches of that kernel version.
As a result, each major version uses one version of the Linux kernel and the vendors patch it throughout the lifecycle. The latest version of RHEL (5) is using a highly patched 2.6.18 - and many of the patches are driver backports. (There are over 2000 patches in total.)
After experiencing a few hardware support regressions (Intel graphics, audio working better with 2.6.18 than 2.6.27, audio working better with the open source and third-party OSS), and after having to upgrade the operating system on perfectly working systems because the old version was not getting necessary bug fixes or security updates, I've generally given up on anything that has a short support lifecycle - no more Debian, no more regular Ubuntu releases, no more Fedora. I only run these distributions in virtual environments, and only when they for things that aren't important.
If you buy used CDs for $1 each, do you pay taxes on the $1 price or on the original retail value?
If you record FM radio on a cassette player, do you pay taxes based on how much the songs would have cost to buy on a casette tape?
If you record a song from Internet radio on your computer, do you pay tax based on the cost for the radio service to license that song and transmit it to you?
If you download the 30 second sample of a 3 minute song, do you pay tax on 1/6th of the purchase price?
The "Vista Capable" issue is nothing compared to this. Only one chipset (915G/915GM) was falsely marketed - at Vista's release, it was two generations old and found primarily in low-end budget systems.
I have a 915GM system, and graphics acceleration still works in Vista - there's just no Aero support. On this system, I can play a video in YouTube without any graphics problems. I can't do this on a 945GM system running Ubuntu 9.04.
Except for the GMA 500, which is used in a few netbooks, the Linux regression affects nearly all of Intel's recent IGPs - including the 915GM found in four year old systems, the G(M)45 found in brand new systems with Intel graphics, and the low-power version of the older 945GM chipset found in many netbooks.
Ubuntu 9.04 had a serious regression on Intel integrated graphics, as did Fedora 10. The sad part is this used to "just work" - Intel's drivers are fully open source.
Intel holds nearly 50% of the PC graphics market share. It's tough to say that it "just works" when nearly half of the latest hardware has broken graphics support - including the nearly all of the netbooks that Linux is supposed to be so great for. I find it troubling that they shipped an OS that broke graphics performance on so many systems - why did this happen now, and what prevents it from happening again?
Windows NT was once released for MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC and was going to be ported to SPARC by a third party. Only the Alpha port sold well enough to justify development, and then Alpha was discontinued before Windows 2000 was released.
Thanks for that, but this is how the uTorrent UI works. The WebUI mimics the Windows UI's functionality, so it's an interactive JavaScript application (using XMLHttpRequest) rather than a set of web pages.
Opera uses Qt on Linux. On Windows, it uses Win32 widgets and on OS X, it uses Carbon. In my opinion, Opera on Windows fits in visually better than Firefox.
On one Ubuntu 9.04 system, Opera 9 is considerably more responsive for me than the included version of Firefox - when using FreeNX, a remote desktop system. The only Firefox addon in use is for mouse gestures.
Opera certainly looks out of place with the standard skin on Ubuntu's Gnome desktop, but it looks better when using KDE. I could also take the time to make it use another Qt engine if I wanted.
I've been using the uTorrent WebUI in Opera for years; for it to work properly, you need to figure out how to keep Opera from intercepting right clicks. I forget how I did that.