I was once the guest of a factory producing hearing aids. They had a very nice diner in it, with above than average food, a pool on the top, everyone used the best available equipment. Somebody has to pay for that.
Funny thing is altough their people (the ones putting the added value into the product) were highly qualified and the best they could find, for the production high percentage of the employees was immigrant. I guess you have the right to choose how you spend your money.
However...open hardware is a fundamentally different thing. No one has chip fabs in their basement. So someone will have to pay big money to make the masks and tape-out and test the hardware. Unless some major vendor picks up the design and mass produces it lots of 100s of thousands, the price per CPU is going to be stupidly more expensive than an off-the-shelf CPU/motherboard or embedded system. And, even then, you are probably buying an overpriced, underpowered CPU just because it is "free."
I think you are more or less right, an opportunity presents itself here: Why is it that no one has a chip fab in their basement? Aside from the obvious difficulties this is a logical milestone on the way to open hardware, and not putting serious $$$ into the pockets of manufacturers, which did not base their business on manufacturing for hobbyists, but to make custom designs for customers who want to go to market as fast as possible, and thinking about how much it costs is only secondary to them.
You haven't, apparently. Otherwise you'd know that it was the Wehrmacht back then, the Bundeswehr came to existence only a decade after the war.
Good point, but it would be interesting to know, what the 1955 Bundeswehr soldiers have done between 39-45. And don't tell me, that all of them were kids that time. Or can the leopard change his spots where you come from?
Ahh, the German Bundeswehr. Of course! I was wondering what those guys were up to.
Who or what is the German Bundeswehr and why should I care?
Jeez, guys, nobody ever saw a WWII movie?
Timmy, great article, by the way. 99% of your readers have no idea what it's about.
It's not the fault of the poster, that you are all illiterate, and do exchange czech beer manufacturers (Budweiser) with one your few remaining allies, who's ass is still on line in your f**ked up war in Afganisthan. (Bundeswehr)
Actually the article states that thing about the airstrikes. Last sentence. Anyway to shoot the poor bastard in head he has to remain in place, and I think the first rule in the Sniping 101, is that you have to leave the scene as fast as possible after you shot once. So if you don't have your own snipers already watching with one of those things somewhere around, you have very small chance to get him. That's why it does not make me too much sense, why this thing is having a moving platform. And this feature where it ignore friendly fire I think can be easily exploited, so it will be switched off on field, so I think at the end you have to pick the right one from a couple of targets which needs some additional database about where your friendly forces are. This is very hard to build, especially with multinational forces, and if you have also loww tech friends around for example like the Northern Alliance. So this thingy could be useful, but not in this form.
Because dedicated cores can solve the same problem more cost efficiently than general cores. Imagine how many general cores would you need to get the capabilities of a GeForce card.
And also I'm not an expert in graphics, but I think you would need a truck load of 64-bit cores to be able to do real-time raytracing.
This is a very good example, why it is a shame that anonymous posts are not showed by default. You just produced the only usable comment in this bunch, and nobody will read it. Nice. Good work, though.
I mean, if you ran some national department store chain, and you had stacks of a product lying around, why would you order more?
What can a little bit change the picture, is that big chains have the habit of only paying for the stock if it was sold. So the supplier only gets his money, when the inventory is gone. Until the point the devices are owned by the supplier, and they get billed when gone.
The Cell has a couple of vector units inside, they can handle graphics operations. The NVidia chip just renders the display lists into the graphics ram, so I dont think it is a GPU in the sense we use the word, like the chips are in the PC accelerator cards. For example I think the shader operations will run on the Cell, and not on the RSX, so how I understand the things, the RSX will be something similar to the GPUs before the original Geforce, without T&L.
I dont think not selling motherboards and NICs is a shortfall of AMDs business model, because I dont think they can make much money with those activities. They just do it, because as a chipset makers they have to have a reference design for every chip they sell, and if they already have them, why not run the mill to produce some. They anyway have to support those reference designs, so it costs not a lot of additional money, and maybe they can sell enough to cover some of the design costs. But they cant make a lot of money in that businnes unit.
People naturally don't act logically. Don't ever expect them to or you will fail. It's easy to change a website, and difficult to change a large population. Pick your battles wisely.
And you expect people, who cant even act logically, to classify the content on which you can later rely on? The problem is, quite a big part of the population is a functional analphabet nowadays, if you rely on them to do a good job in for example classifying information they dont really understand, the results will be far from optimal. Take for example slashdot's modding system.
No, they cant. Maybe they could buy Nintendo, but market value is not cash in your pocket, SCEI is too big for them to swallow. I think the market would tolerate them buying Ninetendo, but if they buy Sony Entertainment, Wall Street kicks them in ass.
So no, they can't afford it. If they screw up with Vista, their shareprice will fall, and then they will kill those adventures.
This is modded insightful? No wonder everybody is reading digg nowadays.
Sony, they had once the walkmans. Where are the walkmans now? IBM actually made this thing we call PC, they are now a consulting company, mostly working on billing more hours to their customers. Should everyone at Google work on search? They are the ones really trying hard to diversify, but they are not nearly as successful with the other projects. Anyway search is in there in every piece of their projects.
Apropo Halo effect, did the XBox division ever made profits except the quarter they released Halo? I think the best way to make yourself obsolete, is to throw a lot of effor other than your core business. Fine, do it if you can do it early, to build a market, but in that market M$ is not even second.
What I mean is that efficiency is the measure of how much your man can produce during a period of time, and it has theoretically nothing to do how much people are working on the project. If you say after a point you can't manage them, I say you are right.
You are right, M$ has too much money laying around. But I think Bill should not try to create more cash cows in this marketing machine, he should take that money, and create an other project, and spend some on basic research. Then he could maybe build up an other M$, but with this Me too! attitude, I dont think he can do it again.
Slashdot Mirror
I was once the guest of a factory producing hearing aids. They had a very nice diner in it, with above than average food, a pool on the top, everyone used the best available equipment. Somebody has to pay for that.
Funny thing is altough their people (the ones putting the added value into the product) were highly qualified and the best they could find, for the production high percentage of the employees was immigrant. I guess you have the right to choose how you spend your money.
However...open hardware is a fundamentally different thing. No one has chip fabs in their basement. So someone will have to pay big money to make the masks and tape-out and test the hardware. Unless some major vendor picks up the design and mass produces it lots of 100s of thousands, the price per CPU is going to be stupidly more expensive than an off-the-shelf CPU/motherboard or embedded system. And, even then, you are probably buying an overpriced, underpowered CPU just because it is "free."
I think you are more or less right, an opportunity presents itself here: Why is it that no one has a chip fab in their basement? Aside from the obvious difficulties this is a logical milestone on the way to open hardware, and not putting serious $$$ into the pockets of manufacturers, which did not base their business on manufacturing for hobbyists, but to make custom designs for customers who want to go to market as fast as possible, and thinking about how much it costs is only secondary to them.
Jeez, guys, nobody ever saw a WWII movie?
You haven't, apparently. Otherwise you'd know that it was the Wehrmacht back then, the Bundeswehr came to existence only a decade after the war.
Good point, but it would be interesting to know, what the 1955 Bundeswehr soldiers have done between 39-45. And don't tell me, that all of them were kids that time. Or can the leopard change his spots where you come from?
Ahh, the German Bundeswehr. Of course! I was wondering what those guys were up to.
Who or what is the German Bundeswehr and why should I care?
Jeez, guys, nobody ever saw a WWII movie?
Timmy, great article, by the way. 99% of your readers have no idea what it's about.
It's not the fault of the poster, that you are all illiterate, and do exchange czech beer manufacturers (Budweiser) with one your few remaining allies, who's ass is still on line in your f**ked up war in Afganisthan. (Bundeswehr)
... it would be nice if you could post a link to a full article in English, what with this being an english site and all. No, babelfish doesn't count.
Can't read the German one? Bad luck, Bro.
I think that is the exact mindset you develop, when you develop everything for high reliability. Take Kalashnyikovs for example :)
Can you elaborate or reference some comparison somewhere? I would be interested...THX.
Actually the article states that thing about the airstrikes. Last sentence. Anyway to shoot the poor bastard in head he has to remain in place, and I think the first rule in the Sniping 101, is that you have to leave the scene as fast as possible after you shot once. So if you don't have your own snipers already watching with one of those things somewhere around, you have very small chance to get him. That's why it does not make me too much sense, why this thing is having a moving platform. And this feature where it ignore friendly fire I think can be easily exploited, so it will be switched off on field, so I think at the end you have to pick the right one from a couple of targets which needs some additional database about where your friendly forces are. This is very hard to build, especially with multinational forces, and if you have also loww tech friends around for example like the Northern Alliance. So this thingy could be useful, but not in this form.
Because dedicated cores can solve the same problem more cost efficiently than general cores. Imagine how many general cores would you need to get the capabilities of a GeForce card. And also I'm not an expert in graphics, but I think you would need a truck load of 64-bit cores to be able to do real-time raytracing.
does it run... Oh, never mind.
This is a very good example, why it is a shame that anonymous posts are not showed by default. You just produced the only usable comment in this bunch, and nobody will read it. Nice. Good work, though.
These sites Slashdot links to become smarter every day. Now they take them offline, before the first post.
The Cell has a couple of vector units inside, they can handle graphics operations. The NVidia chip just renders the display lists into the graphics ram, so I dont think it is a GPU in the sense we use the word, like the chips are in the PC accelerator cards. For example I think the shader operations will run on the Cell, and not on the RSX, so how I understand the things, the RSX will be something similar to the GPUs before the original Geforce, without T&L.
I dont think not selling motherboards and NICs is a shortfall of AMDs business model, because I dont think they can make much money with those activities. They just do it, because as a chipset makers they have to have a reference design for every chip they sell, and if they already have them, why not run the mill to produce some. They anyway have to support those reference designs, so it costs not a lot of additional money, and maybe they can sell enough to cover some of the design costs. But they cant make a lot of money in that businnes unit.
Ever seen a James Bond movie?
No, they cant. Maybe they could buy Nintendo, but market value is not cash in your pocket, SCEI is too big for them to swallow. I think the market would tolerate them buying Ninetendo, but if they buy Sony Entertainment, Wall Street kicks them in ass.
So no, they can't afford it. If they screw up with Vista, their shareprice will fall, and then they will kill those adventures.
This is modded insightful? No wonder everybody is reading digg nowadays.
Sony, they had once the walkmans. Where are the walkmans now? IBM actually made this thing we call PC, they are now a consulting company, mostly working on billing more hours to their customers. Should everyone at Google work on search? They are the ones really trying hard to diversify, but they are not nearly as successful with the other projects. Anyway search is in there in every piece of their projects.
Apropo Halo effect, did the XBox division ever made profits except the quarter they released Halo?
I think the best way to make yourself obsolete, is to throw a lot of effor other than your core business. Fine, do it if you can do it early, to build a market, but in that market M$ is not even second.
I wish you good nitpicking. It is definitely not making I-Pods.
What I mean is that efficiency is the measure of how much your man can produce during a period of time, and it has theoretically nothing to do how much people are working on the project. If you say after a point you can't manage them, I say you are right.
You are right, M$ has too much money laying around. But I think Bill should not try to create more cash cows in this marketing machine, he should take that money, and create an other project, and spend some on basic research. Then he could maybe build up an other M$, but with this Me too! attitude, I dont think he can do it again.