Intel's latest graphics offering is going to fail, not because they don't have the hardware (actually their new larabee looks really fast). but because their graphics drivers have always stunk and there is little evidence to suggest that they will be able to make a leap forward in graphics driver quality that will make their solution better then AMD or nVidia. They have to write full DX9, DX10, and OpenGL drivers to really compete with nVidia, then they have to optimize all those drivers for all the popular games (cause nobody will re-write Doom, HL, UT, FarCry, etc.. just for this new graphics card).
It could happen, but will it?
That's what they used to say about ATI drivers a few years ago. It didn't stop customers from flocking to ATI video cards. The reason for that was ATI hardware was just as good or better than Nvidia. These days I don't hear too much fussing about AMD/ATI drivers. For graphics cards hardware is the key. The best driver will not overcome hardware short comings, but drivers can be upgraded.
There is no reason to think that Intel will have driver problems out the box. Drivers are nothing more than firmware, and Intel has 30 years of experience developing firmware to drive their hardware. They are also big enough to staff a huge department devoted to developing drivers for their graphics chips with the best professionals. Not to mention, they are the largest video chip maker, and I am yet to hear complaints about their drivers.
They will work closely with Microsoft on DX9 and DX10 support. This shouldn't be a problem for Intel, because they already work closely with Microsoft to insure that Windows/DOS works properly on X86 chips. They have been working together since the first IBM PC rolled off the assembly line in 1981.
Lastly, no game maker will have to rewrite their games for a graphics card running DX9/10 on an Intel processor. Why would they have to?
I'm noticing something similar with Youtube and such. It's downloading streaming video a hell of a lot slower, and I keep having to wait for another chunk to download. Whew, I thought is was just me. I have comcast also, and I noticed that when watching Youtube a 3 minute video is broken up into 3, 4 or more chunks. Basically every 30 seconds I have to wait for the next 30 seconds of video to download. I thought maybe it's Youtube, or a problem at my end. Since we both have the same issue, and we both have Comcast, it's looking like Comcast is throttling more than P2P applications.
So if I sign up with MLB to watch games which are not in my local television area, should I expect to get throttled by my local cable company because for 3hrs a week, I use a lot of bandwidth. The other hours of the week, I'm doing email and IM. It depends on your monthly usage as compared to the average user in your area. It also depends on what your ISP determines is heavy usage. 3 hours of video should take up 3 gigabytes of data at 480 X 720 resolution with a bit rate slightly less than DVD quality. Which means your baseball games takes up 12-15 gigabytes monthly. As it is now that is considered light usage in most areas and by most ISP. However, Time Warner is rolling out a trial in certain areas that have a cap of 5 gigabyte per month for their lowest tier and 40 gigabytes per month for their premium tier. Unless you are a Time Warner customer I wouldn't worry about your weekly 3 hours of streaming baseball games.
NVIDIA CEO is worried as he should be. Once upon a time there used to be a math coprosser until Intel figured out a way to integrate it into the regular CPU. The same is going to happen with the GPU processor. There is no reason why in a multi core cpu one that of the cores can't be dedicated to graphics processing. Also, as the dye gets smaller more transistors will fit on a chip. I would think in less than 5 years Intel will be able to fit a full fledge GPU and CPU on the same chip. However, the biggest concern to NVIDIA is how good can integrated graphics get and will this be good enough for game designers. If integrated graphics can approach the performance of NVIDIA middle of the road cards, for example NVIDIA 7600 and 8500 gpu, it will be game over.
The ability to heal quickly and fight off almost any infection would be a huge adaptation for any animal even without the territory battles. The fact that alligators are one of the few (only?) animals to evolve this adaptation indicates that it comes with a hefty price.
The question is, can we leverage this adaptation for ourselves without incurring the price? If the price is energy expended to produce the ultra efficient immune system, that's fine; but if the price is directly tied to the effects themselves this may prove worthless. What price has the alligator paid? Also, sharks have excellent immune systems as well. What do sharks and crocodilians have in common. They both have been on this planet a long long time. Crocs have evolved 200 million years ago and sharks 400 million years. That's a long time for their immune system to develop; so, It comes as no surprise that two of the oldest vertebrae creatures have the most robust immune systems.
"Don't believe me? Look at the GDP figures for the past, oh, 20 years. Subtract TRUE price increases over that time (don't use the ignorant and embarassingly fake CPI figures) from that GDP. We've been in a recession for 20 years, maybe 30 years, even though we may seem to have been strong for a few segments in that time. At almost no time in 30 years have we truly had GDP growth after subtracting the loss of the value of the dollar from the previous time-frame of GDP analysis. This means we're in a permanent recession, and the recession comes from the loss in value of the dollar, which is multiplied many times over due to the hidden tax the banking cartels have created from their money multiplier profit drain."
Wrong. Real GDP has had average annual growth of 4% in the last 20 years. Real GDP is measured by nominal GDP - inflation. Since 1984 there were only two periods that the Real GDP has had 0% or negative growth (1990, 2000). So, if inflation was eating away at the US economy then real GDP growth would be 0 or negative and that is not the case in the last 20 years. Another thing, the US currency historically has been relatively strong. I don't know where you got the weak US currency concept from. Either case, if the US currency was relatively weak in the last 20 years then we would have seen more inflation and weak to no Real GDP growth. That's hasn't happen except during the recession period 1990-1992 and 2000-2002.
So I love OO and have started using it as my primary office suite at home. But it still falls short when it comes to rendering and printing docs and having them look the same as in MS Office.
It's not a huge issue I guess, but it's certainly the reason that I still need to have MS Office installed in a VM. Highly over the top but a necessary step until OO can render stuff faithfully. My wife, for one, will not switch until it displays word docs correctly.
Is this just me having this problem as I never see other people complaining about it.
It's not just you. I had the same problem. Two years ago I was looking for a job and had my resumes on a CD in DOC format. Coincidently my desktop that had Office 2003 crashed. I had to install Open Office on my laptop to edit and customize my resumes. It was a nightmare because Open Office changed the format even though I saved it as DOC. It looked one way in Open Office and another way in MS Word. The good thing was a lot of the jobs that I applied for required the resume to be in either DOC or PDF formats, and Open Office is very compatible with PDF format.
Given the fact that North Korea has fired missiles over the tip Japan, and their nuclear weapons program it is no wonder that Japan wants a first strike weapon. Japan is very concerned about North Korea and would like to have the ability to take out N. Korea missile platforms. A stealth fighter-bomber will give them a serious option against North Korea.
Wow, what a big number. But even with all of those downloads the logs from our server shows that only 17% of visitors are actually using it. Over 80% are IE variants.
Congratulations Firefox, you've managed to get a boat load of people to download your browser, but somehow most people reject it after trying it.
Wow, did you know that you have validated the author's numbers. It wasn't your intention, but you did. The author claims that Firefox 400 million downloads translates into 18% market share more or less. Based on your server statistics, 17% of visitors were Firefox users. So, you see your server agreed with the premise that Firefox has a 18% market share and that the 400 million downloads are indeed valid.
It doesn't affect you when you are downloading (leeching) only when you are seeding, and it doesn't affect speeds. It prevents others from downloading from you. When your download is completed you will notice that no one is leeching from you, because Comcast has a program that gets between you, and the party trying to download from you. If the party(s) are also on Comcast network they are allowed to download from you. If the party(s) are outside Comcast network the program sends an interrupt that breaks the connection. This means when seeding no one outside Comcast network will be connected to you long enough to get more than a few megabytes at a time. One way around this if you want to keep your ratio at 1:1 is to set your download at half the speed of your upload; so than when your download is completed you would have a one to one ratio. I am a Comcast customer, and when I am downloading I would have 10 leechers and as soon as I finished downloading and become a seeder all ten of those leechers are booted within 10 minutes. Surprisingly, I was able to seed during off peek hours between 12am and 8 am. Maybe they are only doing it during peak hours.
When Apple was the leader it had a market share closer to 15% because there were so many other strong competitors. IBM won just because their platform was the most open, allowing for PC Clones compete in the same software market space.
Actually IBM was the dominant PC maker long before they opened up their hardware. IBM was a monopoly in office products especially typewriters where they had about 95% of the market. They used that office monopoly to convince office managers to buy the IBM PC as a replacement for their trusty typewriters. It took IBM one year of entering the pc market to become the leader and by 1985 the IBM PC was the default office standard, and Apple was regulated to schools for the most part. IBM opened up their hard ware after they got a good look at the Apple Macintosh SE.
Yahoo has a few things going for it. For one, it's an excellent news portal and entertainment portal. I think one of the things that are hurting Yahoo is their too close relationship with Internet Explorer at the exclusion of other browsers (i.e. Firefox). I can't access a lot of Yahoo's content with my browser of choice which is not IE; hence, I don't use Yahoo as much as I would other wise. I suspect many Firefox users share my experiences.
Twenty years ago I once accepted a job at a Bank and had to be fingerprinted. The bank didn't hire ex-cons; so, everyone had to be finger printed as a condition of employment. The finger prints were run through the FBI to see if the new employee has a criminal background. The process took about 6 months. I recall about 1996 we hired a new employee who lied on his application about wither he was ever convicted of a crime. Well, the results came back about 5 months later that he did do jail time for drug dealing. He was fired by HR the next day. Too bad, because he was a good worker too. I don't know what the law is, but I believe that financial institutions can't hire ex-convicts, so; they have to run new employees finger prints with the FBI to determine if that employee has a criminal background.
Just like a broken clock, Ballmer is occasionally right. This is one of those times. The smart phone market is incredibly competitive. And Apple will be competing with the likes of Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sanyo, LG, and other giants. If they manage to distinguish their product, that won't last long. If fierce competition wasn't enough, they have to partner with wireless Telco's (that are used to getting their own way).
It wouldn't be the first time that Apple has entered a crowed and competitive market and came out a winner. Some of criticisms in the quote above are similar to what Apple heard when they introduced the Ipod. Given Apple's track record I have every reason to believe they will deliver a competitive product.
Then the product itself is priced too high and is already showing signs of development problems. They pulled developers from Leopard and have taken a (small) schedule slip from the announced date. There are rumors of problems involving the duration 'talk time' per charge. No, I don't think Apple will be a winner in this market.
The product is pricey, but 10% of the market already buy phones in the $300-$400 US dollar range. So, what's 100 dollars more. Also, this phone is not intended for mass appeal although that would be nice. The Iphone is going after a niche market. Their projections are based on a 1% market share which is reasonable given the $500 dollar price tag. All projects have problems. In the history of technology there were no projects that did not run into problems. The issue is not that they have ran into technical problems, but if they can solve these problems with out delays and cost overruns. The Iphone will enter the market in the fall of 2007 so it would suggest that Apple is confident that the problems are solvable. To say that the Iphone will fail at this point when the market has little information on the product other that a price range is silly or at the least bias.
If someone asks us how they did in an interview now (and we're not planning on offering them a job), it's, "Well, we have a lot of candidates to examine, we'll contact you if we're interested in a second interview or need more information. If you have questions about your performance in the interview, we suggest you contact a career counselor who is better equipped and has the appropriate training to answer questions like that."
Your team is being a dick. Your team got burned once, and they are using that to be impolite. What does a career counselor has to do with your hiring team evaluations? How about just replying that you are not at liberty to discuss a candidate's interview performance.
Neutrality is like this fictional/metaphorical highway. I really don't see a need for the government to get involved, one way or another. Let Yahoo try to extort from me, and see if I use Yahoo ever again. However if Yahoo and ATT can assure great content as part of the package (dedicated road for ATT customers), then fine. If they charge too much, I'll just move. I do have other alternatives.
I am not sure that you get the point. The idea behind net neutrality is that it will prevent AT&T from putting a toll booth between their customers and Yahoo website. It will prevent AT&T from down grading Yahoo connection to AT&T customers, because AT&T is offering a competitive service, or Yahoo didn't agree to pay AT&T. It will prevent cable broadband providers from down grading VOIP services from competitors. I can go on and on. In short, net neutrality is good for the consumer.
"Also, what is the rough cost of a 2084?"
The cheapest option is a tad over a million dollars. Here is a break down of the cost of the various flavors of the 2084. http://www.tech-news.com/publib/pl2084.html
Actually cops don't sell drugs they buy it in buy and bust or sting operations. I have never heard (and I live in NYC) of someone getting busted from buying drugs from cops. Only in the movies that happens. I don't think cops are allowed to engage in an illegal action, because it sets up the defense to use entrapment, and selling drugs is a big no-no.
"Yes, I agree. The equivalent iPod is now $50 cheaper thanks to the Zune. I also think that indicates that Apple considers the Zune to be a far greater threat than their fanboys will admit, or Apple would not need to drop the price to remain competitive."..
Maybe, or maybe not. It is more likely that Apple doesn't want Zune to get any early traction in the market. Microsoft has deep pockets and is willing to lose billions to get a big market share; so, Apple cutting prices on all their Ipod product lines for the Christmas season is smart business practice. It is good to see Apple tear a page out of Microsoft business practices book. Maybe if Sony had done that with the PS2 the Xbox would have been a footnote.
"How hard can it be to produce a decent player, really?"
Apparently it is harder than you think. I would imagine if it was that easy then the market would have had an over abundance of good mp3 players.
"the rather fudged implementation of gapless playback that finally arrived with the last updates took away one of the main reasons why I personally wouldn't buy one (seriously, folks, if there's no gaps between the tracks on the CD, and your player puts them in, that is a bug. Fix it. And yes, I know MP3s can't really do true gapless)."
You would not buy an Ipod because of the lack of gapless playback, but tens of millions od consumers would. So, who is right you, or the millions of happy Ipod owners. Besides, I am sure all mp3 players (including Zune) doesn't have gapless playback which tells me it is not an easy feature to implement, and most consumers don't care about the 1 millisecond lag between songs.
I have had Vonage for two years and have no complaints. Also, I know a few customers of Vonage, and they are pleased with the price/performance of their service. It is what it is, and people should realize that the quality and reliability of VOIP services will depend on the quality and reliability of their internet services. That said, Vonage services should be compared to other VOIP services. Based on price, performance and service, Vonaage is the king of the hill.
" the value of nationwide cell-phone coverage is worth more than the drop in value of property around the towers."
Perhaps this is true, but the property owners are not being compensated for their loss.
Intel's latest graphics offering is going to fail, not because they don't have the hardware (actually their new larabee looks really fast). but because their graphics drivers have always stunk and there is little evidence to suggest that they will be able to make a leap forward in graphics driver quality that will make their solution better then AMD or nVidia. They have to write full DX9, DX10, and OpenGL drivers to really compete with nVidia, then they have to optimize all those drivers for all the popular games (cause nobody will re-write Doom, HL, UT, FarCry, etc.. just for this new graphics card).
It could happen, but will it?
That's what they used to say about ATI drivers a few years ago. It didn't stop customers from flocking to ATI video cards. The reason for that was ATI hardware was just as good or better than Nvidia. These days I don't hear too much fussing about AMD/ATI drivers. For graphics cards hardware is the key. The best driver will not overcome hardware short comings, but drivers can be upgraded.
There is no reason to think that Intel will have driver problems out the box. Drivers are nothing more than firmware, and Intel has 30 years of experience developing firmware to drive their hardware. They are also big enough to staff a huge department devoted to developing drivers for their graphics chips with the best professionals. Not to mention, they are the largest video chip maker, and I am yet to hear complaints about their drivers.
They will work closely with Microsoft on DX9 and DX10 support. This shouldn't be a problem for Intel, because they already work closely with Microsoft to insure that Windows/DOS works properly on X86 chips. They have been working together since the first IBM PC rolled off the assembly line in 1981.
Lastly, no game maker will have to rewrite their games for a graphics card running DX9/10 on an Intel processor. Why would they have to?
NVIDIA CEO is worried as he should be. Once upon a time there used to be a math coprosser until Intel figured out a way to integrate it into the regular CPU. The same is going to happen with the GPU processor. There is no reason why in a multi core cpu one that of the cores can't be dedicated to graphics processing. Also, as the dye gets smaller more transistors will fit on a chip. I would think in less than 5 years Intel will be able to fit a full fledge GPU and CPU on the same chip. However, the biggest concern to NVIDIA is how good can integrated graphics get and will this be good enough for game designers. If integrated graphics can approach the performance of NVIDIA middle of the road cards, for example NVIDIA 7600 and 8500 gpu, it will be game over.
Wrong. Real GDP has had average annual growth of 4% in the last 20 years. Real GDP is measured by nominal GDP - inflation. Since 1984 there were only two periods that the Real GDP has had 0% or negative growth (1990, 2000). So, if inflation was eating away at the US economy then real GDP growth would be 0 or negative and that is not the case in the last 20 years. Another thing, the US currency historically has been relatively strong. I don't know where you got the weak US currency concept from. Either case, if the US currency was relatively weak in the last 20 years then we would have seen more inflation and weak to no Real GDP growth. That's hasn't happen except during the recession period 1990-1992 and 2000-2002.
It's not a huge issue I guess, but it's certainly the reason that I still need to have MS Office installed in a VM. Highly over the top but a necessary step until OO can render stuff faithfully. My wife, for one, will not switch until it displays word docs correctly.
Is this just me having this problem as I never see other people complaining about it.
It's not just you. I had the same problem. Two years ago I was looking for a job and had my resumes on a CD in DOC format. Coincidently my desktop that had Office 2003 crashed. I had to install Open Office on my laptop to edit and customize my resumes. It was a nightmare because Open Office changed the format even though I saved it as DOC. It looked one way in Open Office and another way in MS Word. The good thing was a lot of the jobs that I applied for required the resume to be in either DOC or PDF formats, and Open Office is very compatible with PDF format.
Given the fact that North Korea has fired missiles over the tip Japan, and their nuclear weapons program it is no wonder that Japan wants a first strike weapon. Japan is very concerned about North Korea and would like to have the ability to take out N. Korea missile platforms. A stealth fighter-bomber will give them a serious option against North Korea.
Wow, did you know that you have validated the author's numbers. It wasn't your intention, but you did. The author claims that Firefox 400 million downloads translates into 18% market share more or less. Based on your server statistics, 17% of visitors were Firefox users. So, you see your server agreed with the premise that Firefox has a 18% market share and that the 400 million downloads are indeed valid.
It doesn't affect you when you are downloading (leeching) only when you are seeding, and it doesn't affect speeds. It prevents others from downloading from you. When your download is completed you will notice that no one is leeching from you, because Comcast has a program that gets between you, and the party trying to download from you. If the party(s) are also on Comcast network they are allowed to download from you. If the party(s) are outside Comcast network the program sends an interrupt that breaks the connection. This means when seeding no one outside Comcast network will be connected to you long enough to get more than a few megabytes at a time. One way around this if you want to keep your ratio at 1:1 is to set your download at half the speed of your upload; so than when your download is completed you would have a one to one ratio. I am a Comcast customer, and when I am downloading I would have 10 leechers and as soon as I finished downloading and become a seeder all ten of those leechers are booted within 10 minutes. Surprisingly, I was able to seed during off peek hours between 12am and 8 am. Maybe they are only doing it during peak hours.
Actually IBM was the dominant PC maker long before they opened up their hardware. IBM was a monopoly in office products especially typewriters where they had about 95% of the market. They used that office monopoly to convince office managers to buy the IBM PC as a replacement for their trusty typewriters. It took IBM one year of entering the pc market to become the leader and by 1985 the IBM PC was the default office standard, and Apple was regulated to schools for the most part. IBM opened up their hard ware after they got a good look at the Apple Macintosh SE.
Yahoo has a few things going for it. For one, it's an excellent news portal and entertainment portal. I think one of the things that are hurting Yahoo is their too close relationship with Internet Explorer at the exclusion of other browsers (i.e. Firefox). I can't access a lot of Yahoo's content with my browser of choice which is not IE; hence, I don't use Yahoo as much as I would other wise. I suspect many Firefox users share my experiences.
Twenty years ago I once accepted a job at a Bank and had to be fingerprinted. The bank didn't hire ex-cons; so, everyone had to be finger printed as a condition of employment. The finger prints were run through the FBI to see if the new employee has a criminal background. The process took about 6 months. I recall about 1996 we hired a new employee who lied on his application about wither he was ever convicted of a crime. Well, the results came back about 5 months later that he did do jail time for drug dealing. He was fired by HR the next day. Too bad, because he was a good worker too. I don't know what the law is, but I believe that financial institutions can't hire ex-convicts, so; they have to run new employees finger prints with the FBI to determine if that employee has a criminal background.
It wouldn't be the first time that Apple has entered a crowed and competitive market and came out a winner. Some of criticisms in the quote above are similar to what Apple heard when they introduced the Ipod. Given Apple's track record I have every reason to believe they will deliver a competitive product.
Then the product itself is priced too high and is already showing signs of development problems. They pulled developers from Leopard and have taken a (small) schedule slip from the announced date. There are rumors of problems involving the duration 'talk time' per charge. No, I don't think Apple will be a winner in this market.
The product is pricey, but 10% of the market already buy phones in the $300-$400 US dollar range. So, what's 100 dollars more. Also, this phone is not intended for mass appeal although that would be nice. The Iphone is going after a niche market. Their projections are based on a 1% market share which is reasonable given the $500 dollar price tag. All projects have problems. In the history of technology there were no projects that did not run into problems. The issue is not that they have ran into technical problems, but if they can solve these problems with out delays and cost overruns. The Iphone will enter the market in the fall of 2007 so it would suggest that Apple is confident that the problems are solvable. To say that the Iphone will fail at this point when the market has little information on the product other that a price range is silly or at the least bias.
Your team is being a dick. Your team got burned once, and they are using that to be impolite. What does a career counselor has to do with your hiring team evaluations? How about just replying that you are not at liberty to discuss a candidate's interview performance.
I am not sure that you get the point. The idea behind net neutrality is that it will prevent AT&T from putting a toll booth between their customers and Yahoo website. It will prevent AT&T from down grading Yahoo connection to AT&T customers, because AT&T is offering a competitive service, or Yahoo didn't agree to pay AT&T. It will prevent cable broadband providers from down grading VOIP services from competitors. I can go on and on. In short, net neutrality is good for the consumer.
"Also, what is the rough cost of a 2084?" The cheapest option is a tad over a million dollars. Here is a break down of the cost of the various flavors of the 2084. http://www.tech-news.com/publib/pl2084.html
Actually cops don't sell drugs they buy it in buy and bust or sting operations. I have never heard (and I live in NYC) of someone getting busted from buying drugs from cops. Only in the movies that happens. I don't think cops are allowed to engage in an illegal action, because it sets up the defense to use entrapment, and selling drugs is a big no-no.
"Yes, I agree. The equivalent iPod is now $50 cheaper thanks to the Zune. I also think that indicates that Apple considers the Zune to be a far greater threat than their fanboys will admit, or Apple would not need to drop the price to remain competitive." ..
Maybe, or maybe not. It is more likely that Apple doesn't want Zune to get any early traction in the market. Microsoft has deep pockets and is willing to lose billions to get a big market share; so, Apple cutting prices on all their Ipod product lines for the Christmas season is smart business practice. It is good to see Apple tear a page out of Microsoft business practices book. Maybe if Sony had done that with the PS2 the Xbox would have been a footnote.
"How hard can it be to produce a decent player, really?" Apparently it is harder than you think. I would imagine if it was that easy then the market would have had an over abundance of good mp3 players. "the rather fudged implementation of gapless playback that finally arrived with the last updates took away one of the main reasons why I personally wouldn't buy one (seriously, folks, if there's no gaps between the tracks on the CD, and your player puts them in, that is a bug. Fix it. And yes, I know MP3s can't really do true gapless)." You would not buy an Ipod because of the lack of gapless playback, but tens of millions od consumers would. So, who is right you, or the millions of happy Ipod owners. Besides, I am sure all mp3 players (including Zune) doesn't have gapless playback which tells me it is not an easy feature to implement, and most consumers don't care about the 1 millisecond lag between songs.
I have had Vonage for two years and have no complaints. Also, I know a few customers of Vonage, and they are pleased with the price/performance of their service. It is what it is, and people should realize that the quality and reliability of VOIP services will depend on the quality and reliability of their internet services. That said, Vonage services should be compared to other VOIP services. Based on price, performance and service, Vonaage is the king of the hill.
" the value of nationwide cell-phone coverage is worth more than the drop in value of property around the towers." Perhaps this is true, but the property owners are not being compensated for their loss.