Posts by Adam Nealis

Retain margin. Don't join the Race To The Bottom.

If Apple tried to accelerate their change in share of PCs and servers, they would have to do it by producing more types of model at different (lower) price points.

They would reduce their margin on PC hardware from the 30% or so it is today.

As a business, they would start to look more like Dell or HP or Nokia. Incredible fragmentation and a range of offerings that continuously morph into one another so smoothly that, if they were fossils in the record palaeontologists would cream their pants at the completeness of the "transitional species".

Increased staff for support/ sales/ manufacturing and all the bureaucracy that goes with it.

Or, they can watch as World + Dog catches on to the idea that netbooks are just smaller (cr)aptops, and keyboards are a PITA to deal with compared to being able to use your fingers directly and a soft keyboard when you absolutely have to write something. Then sell you an iPad as you help to kill that class of PC.

The cost of wind, the price of wind, the value of wind

For anyone interested in learning more about wind power, try this search for a list of articles:

<http://www.theoildrum.com/search/apachesolr_search/wind%20power%20base%20load%20jerome?filters=uid%3A884>

Esp. The cost of wind, the price of wind, the value of wind

<http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5354>

Wind's latest problem: it . . . makes power too cheap

<http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/6418>

Got Safari 5.0 at the weekend.

On an iMac. And no problems. It didn't even announce itself as v5.0.

How is this different from iMacros?

How is this different from iMacros?

As for batteries ...

Maybe BaTiO3 will work out

Why not Pseries + LPAR + AIX + VmWare ESX

Cheaper than Zseries. High-end Pseries frames are bulletproof enough.

Give ESX a single large virtual CPU and avoid multi-CPU licensing problems with Windoze.

Reciprocity

@Anonymous Coward Posted Thursday 5th March 2009 12:44 GMT

I take your point. A counter to this might be something like this:

The Arabs (or other states with a lot of sunshine) can use solar for a lot of their power generation. But for base load, nuclear is fine. Studies have already been done by the EU to look at the feasibility of solar in African deserts transmitted to Europe. One can imagine a reciprocal arrangement where solar is provided in return for nuclear.

Containers?

I always thought containers were a bit of a cop-out when compared to IBM's approach. Glad that LDoms are an option.

Will W7 have an "I know what I'm doing" option?

Windows admin is a real PITA compared with, say, OS X. With the OS X you make change and it's done. None of this OK / Yes I'm sure / OK / OK crap.

Sony nor Microsoft have yet to profit ...

... from hardware sales of their next gen consoles. Am I right?

Meanwhile, Nintendo make money on each Gamecube, Gameboy, DS or Wii they sell.

1934 and all that

This article appears to address the 1934/ 1998 issue. Looks like posters here have been frothing over a difference that is not statistically significant.

<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/1934-and-all-that/>

These next paragraphs only concern the USA.

"There were however some very minor re-arrangements in the various rankings (see data). Specifically, where 1998 (1.24 ºC anomaly compared to 1951-1980) had previously just beaten out 1934 (1.23 ºC) for the top US year, it now just misses: 1934 1.25ºC vs. 1998 1.23ºC. None of these differences are statistically significant."

"More importantly for climate purposes, the longer term US averages have not changed rank. 2002-2006 (at 0.66 ºC) is still warmer than 1930-1934 (0.63 ºC - the largest value in the early part of the century) (though both are below 1998-2002 at 0.79 ºC)."

Globally, we have:

"In the global mean, 2005 remains the warmest (as in the NCDC analysis). CRU has 1998 as the warmest year but there are differences in methodology, particularly concerning the Arctic (extrapolated in GISTEMP, not included in CRU) which is a big part of recent global warmth. No recent IPCC statements or conclusions are affected in the slightest."

It is and it isn't a video iPod that makes 'phone calls.

You wrote:

"The iPhone is a video iPod with a better screen that just happens to make phone calls."

In a sense that's true. From the end user's point of view I suppose that's valid.

But under the hood, so to speak, this device runs OS X, rather than WINCE or Java or Flash, or a custom ASIC (as is the case with the iPod). Which makes it a handheld computer with a decent operating system.

As a video iPod it's limited to a 4GB or 8GB capacity, unlike the 30GB video iPods.

I won't be buying one of these for the following main reasons:

8GB is not enough to store my entire music collection. This is something I can do with my current MP3 player and is a feature that is important to me.

I don't like the idea of having to use a QWERTY keyboard to do SMS. Having no tactile feedback is bad enough, but trying to type with one hand is nowhere near as efficient as using the usual predictive text system.

Here we go again

64 cores is a record?

Umm, let's see. MS are claiming a record for a product that hasn't shipped yet.

Are there any off the shelf 64-way Intel or AMD servers out there yet? Or are MS "accidentally" counting cores instead?

More vapourware I suppose.

IBM have been shipping their p595 for a while now. This goes up to 64 CPUs. So at best M$ can only be claiming they are equalling a record.

We've been here before.

"There are perhaps three ways, one of which has been seen not to work, of making web pages look okay on a small screen. The first way, to insist that the web developer also builds a specialist handset version of its pages, just doesn’t work, as earlier version of WAP showed us.

That leaves two more possibilities, either we have the browser behave so intelligently that it can fluidly re-lay out the page, using some underlying understanding of how big text and graphics have to be on this particular sized screen for humans to be comfortable with it, or we can change the way the browser functions."

Addressing the first paragraph above: Does anyone remember that HTML, and later XML, were supposed to allow your content to render correctly in a device independent manner? And neither of those has worked, has it? I truly wonder what the conceptual deficit is in those who design software to not realise and actually solve this problem. Or have these claims always been marketecture?

Many people knew that WAP was crap before it got started. It was enough trouble trying to get basic (v3.2) HTML to render acceptably in more than one browser without having to fiddle about with another layout for WAP.

To the second paragraph: I haven't used an iPhone, so I don't know if this layout problem has been solved. I'll take your word for it. If the device independent layout problem has been solved, it seems to me that it might have been solved outside of HTML/ XML/ or whatever. But might that not freak out the web page designers who want to treat HTML as if it were DTP?

The Deepfish approach sounds really dumb. The idea of scrolling and zooming round a "map" of a web page, via the UI MS are likely to deliver, sounds hateful. I imagine having it being something akin to using streetmap.com to find the nearest off licence.