Even good Christians reject DRM

Subject: ...400 WiMAX deployments by 2008

WiMax will almost certainly be first deployed in the downtown cores where people already have the choice between DSL, Cable modems, and sometimes even fibre. Meanwhile, just out of town, the poor slobs living on three acres will be stuck with dial-up or slow & expensive satellite access.

This is EXACTLY the situation in Halifax Nova Scotia Canada where the WiMax precursor system is now up and running, in the downtown core.

Jeffy

Subject: Shareholders ask AMD questions

Why didn't anyone ask them why AMD doesn't listen to the market and include some S939 CPU's in the "tsunami" of new products?

T Wolf

Subject: Google complicity in DVD key leak exposed

Joe is one cool mucker and P. Dotson has too much time on his hands.

Docjr

Subject: AMD meeting

This sums up the reality of the situation:

"AMD didn't want Intel to have much of a clue about the next generation of products it had, another AMDer"

And I, like many others think AMD is wise NOT to tell what they have coming for new products. Intel has had to copy AMD's designs just to catch up so why tell them all about K10 before it's delivered?

Intel is good at talking shit but not delivering the results. We'll see how bad they suffer with the K10 is launch.

Randy

Subject: Sex, lies, and videotape

Aaah, the Inquirer that prides itself somewhat immune to propaganda has just taken the bait, hook, line and sinker.

In the future please research a story a bit, rather than reading just the press release.

a) silicon has never been used to "insulate chips"

b) nothing about the method is self-assembling, as plainly shown on IBM's own web site. All they are doing is take a well established technique developed in academia (block co-polymerization) which happens to self assemble, and apply it in a manner that does not use any part of the self-assembly behavior

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/attachment/21463.wss?fileId=ATTACH_FILE1&a mp;fileName=airgap_vo.wmv

c) IBM never said that "semiconductors using this techique will be 20 nanometres wide", though they did obfuscate the truth enough to make it seem so. Once again their own web site shows that the places where this technique is used in the process are rather mundane, the upper metal layers where features are closer to 500nm wide.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/attachment/21479.wss?fileId=ATTACH_FILE2&a mp;fileName=airgapsem1r.jpg

d) The obfuscation continues further in their foil claiming 10 enabling innovations over the past 10 years. Copper was indeed theirs, and so was SOI, and SiGe. Strain was clearly Intel's (IBM had tried to make it work for 10 years with a now defunct approach, and never did), and so was High-k/metal gate. 3D stacking, multi-core, and 3D stacking are also not IBM's.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/attachment/21476.wss?fileId=ATTACH_FILE2&a mp;fileName=10breakthroughs11.jpg

Full disclaimer: I work for that other blue company on the West Coast.

Boyanov

Subject: What a great product name

By the way, what's a Pheromone?

Cheers,
Sean

Subject: Opteron, Xeon Woodcrest compared in SQL test

Both servers were configured with similar clock speeds, memory, disk drives and OSes.

Similar clock speeds, gee wow! I thought that with two different marchitectures, you take the best that each marchitecture can offer.

Obviously a particular combination of marchitecture and process technology will allow one company to get higher clock speeds than the other, at a possibly lower IPC value. Designing a marchitecture is always a tradeoff between clock speed and IPC, so you may design a marchitecture that gives lower IPC but that can scale to higher clocks. The execution time of course depends on both IPC and clock speeds. IMHO, they should take the best top of the line that both companies have to offer and compare those.

It is like comparing the running speed of two persons, one with a long stride and slow repetition speed, another with a short stride and fast repetitions. Of course if you restrict the little guy to slower repetitions it is unfair :-)

Rock Judas

Subject: Page counts and card reviews

"a review of a video card is split over at least half a dozen pages"

At that count, there isn't a single hardware site on the Internet that isn't a lowly blog unworthy of being published. Tom's Hardware is probably among the worst offenders, frequently placing a pic or two and five or six short sentences worth far less than a kilobyte on a page with ten times that amount in ads, menu options and product placements.

Anandtech is slightly better, at least there is several paragraphs per page, each composed of several dozen words in multiple sentences, plus pics. Ace's Hardware does pretty well most of the time, with six-page reviews but loads of interesting text to read on the pages that are not just pic-score table-comment.

ArsTechnica is one notch better, with even more information per page and a lot less miscellaneous links and distracting ads. iXBT Labs is of the same level - highly technical, loads of info per page, rather more ads.

I could go on all day, but none of the technical sites I look at on a regular basis have one-page reviews.

And I trust that no one will confuse the sites I name above with mere blogs. The only site I know of that does one-page product reviews is BBspot - and that's a satire site.

Pascal

Try reading the INQ, Pascal Letterman

Subject: AMD has dreams of three more factories

Luther Forest Technology Campus? Or Luthor, properly saying? Is there any multibillionaire guy sponsoring this?

Maybe they could start to manufacture kryptonite, too. Looks like recently AMD reached some impressive speed mark.. but does anyone know how they got it? What is inside the damn chips? Is it really silicon?

'Power House' acquires a new dimension.

Corvu
Conspiracy Theory Announcer

Subject: Vista is a battery hog - report

Hi there. They are battery hog because the system use 100% of it's resources to manage the OS.

Toshiba, Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo and others, were selling laptops with Vista upgrades. People get them, they put them in and BOOM. Everything slows down even on Dual Core Centrinos with 2Gb Ram. Why?

How is possible to expect 3d rendering from the Intel onboard (G945 at 90%) with 32MB allocated? You try to open a window and take ages. Not mentioning the times to boot.

The good news is that my business grew by 600% the last 2 weeks (heh moduslink start shipping Vista upgrades 4 weeks ago) on formating laptops and send them back to XP. With every customer swearing to IT Gods that they will never touch Vista ever again.

Panos

Subject: Intentional laptop design flaws

On a similar note, I've dismembered a few laptops over the last couple of years and found an interesting trend. The biggest problem with most of the computers was that one day, the battery stopped charging, and the computer could no longer be powered directly from AC. Once the battery died, it looked like the whole computer had failed.

All of the computers shared a very cheap, poorly made power connector with an internal switch. In the DIY audio community, this kind of switch is attractive for new builders working on projects that can be powered by both battery and an AC adapter. Radioshack is often the first place new DIY'ers go, and they have one of these types of power connectors with the internal switch. Unfortunately, many people buy them, only to return home to find that dozens, if not hundreds, of others have made the same mistake only to have the switch break after a few dozen plug insertions.

The switched connectors I found on the laptops were all very similar to those awful radioshack ones. They were also all broken, in a couple of cases they were even shorting the battery or the ac adapter.

It seems disturbingly common for small, relatively high stress components to be chosen for how predictable their breakage will be, and how catastrophic the result will appear. In the case of the broken power connector, the computer appears to be trashed. Repair techs will tell you need a new motherboard (I was quoted between USD400 and USD800 for the job), and will quite often suggest a new computer will be better than repairing the old one. They'll even offer small discounts on data transfer from the dead laptop to the newly purchased one, explaining that with their wonderful data extraction techniques, they can recover things previously believed unrecoverable.

I seriously doubt that the techs ever really expect to replace the motherboard on a laptop. More than likely, a refurbished one lacking memory and hard drive will be shipped out and the missing items transferred from the dead one. The sad thing is that in many cases, the repair will be soldering a $0.02 power connector to the motherboard. $0.02-parts, $0.10-solder, 30-120 minutes of work depending on the mentality of the offending tech.

The problem is that techs are now used by retailers as salespeople. Repair quotes are always insane, usually including unnecessary, pointless, and unperformed work. What should be a $15 to $75 job becomes a way for retailers and manufacturers to encourage new purchases. For Apple, the mentality of their userbase allows them even more freedom than the pc makers have. Apple users seem content to buy a new iQuack every year or two on principle. Apple encourages this by integrating shoddy parts in high stress positions. I'm quite surprised that the followers of Jobs have even complained about it rather than flock to the Apple store to pick up an overpriced MacBook. They seem content to eat every other piece of shit Apple tosses their way.

S Dedalus

Subject: IBM makes Mark queasy

Seems to me you mis-read Marks bog. IBM's UK press release make him (Mark) quesay. IBM's semicon's fab inventions are ledgendary. The UK press boffin obviously was having some fun trying to explain a complex subject to the UK masses. Marks oversized ego could have been better served if he took the time to explain how of a better dialectric could improve chip performance.

LW Wheaton

Subject: Bloatware

I know that Nero has come in for some stick lately for turning a CD burning program into a suite or programs to do /everything/. Now you'd think that other companies might capitalise on this. But no. We've recently bought a couple of new machines at work which came with Roxio Creator 9 XE. As is standard practice with new machines, I wiped the first one and put a fresh copy of XP Pro onto it, then tried to install Roxio Creator 9 on it.

I made the mistake of hitting "Complete" initially and then sat there for nearly quarter of an hour whilst Creator 9 slowly installed (this PC is a Core 2 Duo machine with 1GB of RAM). After a reboot, I'm then bombarded with drag-and-drop windows, utilities in the system tray which are monitoring all of my media folders, etc. Not what I wanted!

One (very slow) uninstall then a custom install later, I get chance to look down the huuuge list of crap that Creator 9 comes with. Let's see, there's Creator, VideoWave, MyDVD, Disk Copier, PhotoSuite, Roxio Backup, Label Creator, Media Import, Media Manager, Music Disk Creator, Digital Home, Sound Editor, Easy Audio Capture and Disk Image Loader (deep breath). Total install size? 454MB. That's just utterly ridiculous. Why hasn't anyone at Roxio looked at this and thought "Aren't we going overboard somewhat?"

When will companies realise that customers don't want mountains and mountains of crap like this. They just want a CD/DVD burning package which installs, works and doesn't install loads of pointless services and startup utilities all over their system. What we need now are other companies to realise this and step into this nice market which Nero, Roxio etc. are busy vacating.

And on another completely different note, /PLEASE/ can you fix your site so that the e-mail page displays correctly in Firefox.

Regards,
Dave

Subject: bah!

You'd think with all the controls and critical thinking going on in "proper journalism" that they would get things right. When they overlook glaring obviousness to promote government propaganda the public gets sick of it.

Why didn't the press publish the obvious facts about Iraq's weapons of mass distruction, the delivery systems for said WMDs and their relationship, or lack thereof, with Al Qaeda? How can they now be trumpeting the same propaganda vis a vis Iran without guilt or shame. Although the public is by and large foolish and gullible, after all they have bought the objective journalist schtick, we are not total fools.

Bloggers have shown the capability to state the bleedin obvious, as you pommy bastards say, unlike journalists. Sure some bloggers are nuts and some are kooks but that's not much different from the major newspapers. Read any editorial page on any given day. You'll see what I mean.

In short, journalists and the corporate newspapers don't print anything remotely objective. People recognize that. They look elsewhere for information.

It's journalists who should be held in contempt as they are supposed to be professionals.

Shaw

Subject: The Public has Spoken: NO DRM!

The Christian Science Monitor has a three page story about how Digg's members wouldn't let the HD-DVD key be taken down:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0504/p03s01-ussc.html?s=hns

The masses have spoken!

In solidarity,

Brad

Subject: Vista is a battery hog - report

Thats funny, Aqua seems do do just fine on my powerbook under open GL. Oh thats right, Microbloat insists on using it's proprietary interface, Direct X.

Have a great day,
Glenn

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

If the times are being displayed in local time it makes perfect sense. Add the 3 hour time difference and you get 4 hours and 50 minutes.

Ali

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

Just a guess but there is a little thing called timezones that might account for the "short" transit time. While I couldn't find a direct fight from Indianapolis to Oakland a similar distance from Chicago to Oakland clocks in at around 4.5 hours. 3 hour difference due to timezones = 1.5 hours. I guess supersonic delivery is still a ways off :)

Mike

Subject: Fedex and supersonic flight

I wonder if those are local times of the place they were scanned in. If so, this makes perfect sense given the 2 hour difference (I think) between Indiana and California.

Brian

Subject: More Time Zone Fun

If you book a flight on Delta from Atlanta, GA to Huntsville, AL you go back in time. You can leave Atlanta at 1:29pm and arrive in Huntsville at 1:20pm. If FedEX has Supersonic flight, Delta must have Hypersonic flight...

ajmayhall

Subject: Not-so-supersonic Fedex

*Local* times are likely being cited in your screenshot. IN is two hours ahead of CA. Travel time thus 3h41m, which strikes me as about right...

I travel too much and am used to seeing this on itineraries...
Alexis

Subject: FedEX planes

Hello.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm willing to bet anything you want that there is a substantial timezone difference between the two places.

FedEx (and all other couriers AFAIK) note the local time in their tracking, see.

Sincerely,
RasEm Brsiq

Subject: Time is relative

Actually, it's a not so amazing 3:40 travel time. Indy is in the eastern time zone, while Oakland is pacific time, a 2 hour difference. 3:40 sounds about right for that long of a flight. Coast to coast (which I have done a couple times is a bit under 5 hours.

Aahznotoz

Subject: FedEx and timezones

Leonard Hermens

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

It's possible Fedex uses local times for their tracking information. If so you'd need to add 3 hours for the difference in time zones to the 1 hr and 41 min to get the real time difference. Indianapolis, IN is about 2000 miles from Oakland, CA...at lets say 500 miles an hour that would be a 4hr flight time so 4 hours and 41 minutes between scans seems entirely possible.

Yossarian

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

Perhaps I missed the joke on this one, but aren't you forgetting about the 3 hour time difference between Indiana and California?

Emxpert

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

It's only one hour and 41 minutes if you ignore the three hours time zone difference between EDT and PDT. Though that would make it even less of a story.

Sirhc

Subject: Supersonic Fedex

Yes it's funny, but probably a matter of local time between central time zone and pacific time zone. Therefore it actually took 3hr41m to arrive... a normal plane flight.

SP North

Subject: Fedex is not supersonic

Indianapolis is in the US Eastern timezone, Oakland is 4 hours behind in the US Pacific timezone. So it was not 1 hour and 41 minutes, it was 5 hours and 41 minutes. The distance between the two cities is roughly 2000 miles, so that puts the average speed of the plane at roughly 360mph -- well below 650mph which is roughly the speed of sound at the altitude which planes generally fly.

HPC Jerry

Subject: Supersonic... Not.

Uh, flight times are always local to their location. Indy is in the Central time zone, Oakland is in the Pacific, so it is 2 hours "behind". So, your 1:41 minute trip, was actually 3:41 minutes.

If it had been supersonic+, or actually over 1000 mph, it would have arrived before it had left.

Dropper

Subject: Fedex supersonic article

Fedex displays times in the local time zone for that fedex location. (duh!)

Simon

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

You guys! Here in the states we are big enough to need a few time zones to cover it all, and when you factor in the 2 hour difference in time zones 'tween Indy and the Left Coast, the transit time is right on the money.

Good story, though!!

Amtronic

Subject: Thats fast!

2269 miles/ 101 minutes

1347.92079 mph

not bad!

A

Subject: Your FedEX article...

Your analysis is silly. Indiana is on Eastern Time and California is on Pacific time. That flight took 4:40, not 1:40 as you quote.

You complain about Americans working with only one language, what about Englishmen who work with only one time zone!

T Fleming

Subject: FedEx Supersonic

Eh, you forgot the time change of two hours. The Inq seems to be thinking slow today.

Oneyedbandit

Subject: Time Warp

It's amazing how time zones work, eh?

Owain

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

It is listed in local time. Given the spread of the country, there are four timezones. Also with Indiana being one of the states that doesn't follow daylight savings time (yes we have that too except it doesn't say in step with your imperial version of daylight savings time) that could be up to four hours and forty one minutes.

If FedEx was a little faster, it could potentially reach Oakland before it left Indiana(in your reality)... But that would have been a more amusing headline.

Regards
Clyde

Subject: It a timezone thing, duh

All timezones on tracking are local to the location so it actually took a bit longer.

It would have been 850 in Indianapolis.

Cheers,
Steve

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

if you take the 3 hour time difference between the two places into account, it wasn't so super-duper...

Shaun

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

erm -- I think that the fed ex times are local. Since Minneapolis is two time zones away from Oakland, that gives 3 hrs 41 minutes, not 1 hour 41 minutes as you suggest

Pers

Subject: Fedex Super Duper Technology

Isn't 4pm in Indianapolis 1pm in Oakland? This means, the Plane left at 1pm Oakland, and arrived 5:50pm Oakland... it's not 1 hour and change... it's almost 5 hours.

Share what you're smoking!

Dudebert

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

Perhaps you are aware of time zones? Those strange and invisible lines that encircle the world, causing clocks to change their time based solely on their position around the globe?

Perhaps you are aware of Zulu time, and local time? Perhaps you will note that the local time in California is some three hours behind Indianapolis. So if a flight takes off from Indy and flies directly from the FedEx hub in Indianapolis and lands at the Oakland Hub in California, it'll take about 4½ hours to flight from Indy to Oakland. Looking at that in Indy time take off is 4:09pm in Indy, at the other end of the flight the time in Indy is about 8:50 pm. In California that is 5:50pm.

You'd think that the Inquirer might check it's facts before shooting off it's mouth. Oh, but wait, the story is filed under that great name Adamson Rust.

Come on guys, you can do better. How about yanking the story, or adding a correction?

GMT

Subject: FedEX planes go supersonic

Appears that your IQ is decreasing as fast as a FedEx can fly -- IND to OAK involves (3) time zones (the sun is involved - have Charlie explain). In a Dali-esque world it is amazing but Reality Earth means that it took 3 hr 40 mins for the molecules to re-assemble in OAK, not bad for early 21st century Earthlings to accomplish. I am sooo glad that I am insulated enough from the rest of the world so they dont see my brain-farts ;)

Al L.