Just announced in Wired magazine, the Chinese government has provided 2.7 billion dollars to establish an aircraft manufacturing company to manufacture large jetliners. This is an attempt at becoming less dependent on foreign companies like Boeing and Airbus for really large capacity planes.

The first attempts by the China Commercial Aircraft Company will be to build an aircraft of 150 seats. As of the press announcement, no formal date for the first flight was announced. It was stated that it would take some time for the talent to be aggregated and the first designs to be completed.

European-builder Airbus has stated that Chinese domestic flights will increase by 500% from now to 2026, so it is only natural for them to have a larger aircraft industry.

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Tags: wired, airbus, boeing, china commercial aircraft co.

…before you are willing to do something about it? 

What am I talking about? I am talking about the cost of gasoline today, and how high the cost must be before you are willing to change your habits.

In my lifetime, I have seen a twenty fold increase in the cost of gasoline, and no matter how I try, I still can’t get my head around it. I know it does not have to be that way. While it is true that the amount of oil is running out, and that electric cars are available, we must face one thing…the greatest number of transportational devices on the planet are of the internal combustion type.

In the vein of being energy efficient, and also not trying to re-invent the wheel, would it not make sense to derive a ‘green’ way to fuel all these vehicles? Also, by looking in places other than the vegetable section of the market, we also alleviate problems with the world’s food supply.

Perhaps the one thing George Bush was right about (yes, imagine that - George Bush being right about something, and at the same time, someone like me pointing it out - what a marvelous confluence of things!) is that hydrogen is a wonderful source of energy for internal combustion vehicles. Where he went astray was not pushing madly for the changes to come as soon as possible.  (This points out one of the problems with George Bush. He is entirely too involved with Big Oil to ever extricate his thinking from that direction.)

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the entire universe, surely we can find, if we really try, to get an efficient way to collect enough to supply the internal combustion vehicles of our world, without involving oil, corn, or sugar.

A start might be using huge solar farms, located in remote areas, so as not to affect the aesthetic sensibilities of those who usually are against these types of projects, to provide the energy for electrolysis, which produces no pollution, and at the same time gives a source of pure oxygen, and allows complete source efficiency, with no waste produced.

Obviously, it will take much more than solar farms to make enough for the number of vehicles in use today, but it is a start,  One of the areas being investigated is the use of microbial production of hydrogen on a grand scale.

The really important thing to remember is that each time in history when a huge problem was encountered, the method to a solution was not one of simple conservation of a resource, or change in habits. A new direction was taken and a way to a better, not restricted, way of living was found.

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Quote of the day:
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent. - Robert Copeland

Tags: hydrogen, oil crisis, ‘green’ energy’, pollution, solar power, electrolysis

On MSN today,  is a story of a family of 19, soon to be 20, and there seems to be no word of an end in sight.

Think about that for a moment. 18 children, and nary a one adopted.

I usually feel that what people do is their business, and the government, and other people should stay clear of it. When the problem is one such as this, however, I think at least a little peer pressure should be used. Everyone is talking about going green, saving energy, and conserving the Earth’s resources, yet people like this refuse to take a reasonable view (yes, my view, but if you are sane, it should be yours, too - I will explain) and curtail the number of children they have, all that will become consumers of every resource on the planet.

This is my basic problem with a few religions, and yes, these people are members of a sect I have never heard of (perhaps they invented it!) called Quiverful.  Now, I’m guessing that this has something to do with arrows in a quiver, and having plenty - but it just as easily could be what they are when they realize how much those many children will cost, not simply in dollars, but in time ( it certainly causes me to quiver! ).

from MSN

The Duggar kids planned a big Mother’s Day surprise for their mom this year. But the surprise was on them when Michelle Duggar announced on the TODAY Show that they were soon to welcome an 18th sibling.

“We’re expecting!” the happy mother told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira and the entire Arkansas clan. “Number 18!

“They didn’t know. My girls watch the calendar like a hawk. We just found out on Monday night.”

“On Monday night she brought one of the [pregnancy] testers in,” Michelle’s husband Jim Bob added. “I wanted to bring it with me, but she wouldn’t let me.”

And baby, due around New Year’s Day, would make 20.

Joshua, the Duggars’ eldest son, said the news, two days before Mother’s Day was “a shock” — if only to a point.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” the 20-year-old said. “But it’s been nine months [since the birth of the last baby], so yeah.”

Family forest
To date, the Duggars’ 17 natural children range in age from 20 years to 9 months. Included in the mix are 10 boys and seven girls — Joshua, twins Jana and John-David, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, Joseph, Josiah, Joy-Anna, twins Jedidiah and Jeremiah, Jason, James, Justin, Jackson, Johannah and baby Jennifer, who arrived last Aug. 2.

With two sets of twins, Michelle, 41, has gone through 15 pregnancies that ended in 13 natural deliveries and two Caesarean sections.

Both Michelle and Jim Bob — a former state legislator who served in the Arkansas House of Representatives — are real estate agents. They claim their family is debt-free, with the entire bunch helping to build their 7,000-square-foot home in Tontitown. And they are enriched by a devout faith in their religion.

The Duggars are followers of the evangelical Christian movement called Quiverful, which teaches that children are God’s blessing and that husbands and wives should happily welcome every child they are given. In fact, the Duggars’ Web site, duggarfamily.com, quotes “Children are a heritage of the Lord” from verse 3 of the 123rd Psalm.

“We just let the Lord decide,” Jim Bob, 42, told Vieira.

“They are such a gift and we’re enjoying them so much,” Michelle added. “We would love more, and the power of the Lord took our faith to give us another one.”

The Duggars married in 1984, when Michelle was 17 and Jim Bob was 19. They held off on having kids for four years before Michelle ceased taking birth control pills to have their first child. After Joshua was born in 1988, Michelle returned to birth control but wound up getting pregnant anyway. Unfortunately, she suffered a miscarriage, which the couple attributed to use of the pill.

Michelle and Jim Bob decided to pray for as many children as God would give them. Within a year, Michelle was pregnant with the first of their two sets of twins.

Their large number of offspring has meant other large numbers for the Duggars. Michelle has been pregnant for 135 months of her life, with an average of 18 months between births. The family estimates it has used 90,000 diapers and launders 200 loads of clothes each month in a row of industrial-size washers and dryers.

Even though they go through three loaves of bread per day, they claim to feed their family for less than $2,000 a month. Transportation is facilitated by nine vehicles, led by a 21-passenger bus. They estimate that all members of the family have combined to work approximately 39,000 hours on their home.

Each child learns to play both violin and piano. And for what it’s worth, when child No. 18 arrives, they’ll have enough kids to field two baseball teams.

Most importantly, there is a unique dedication to serve the greater good of the home and family. An older child will take on the responsibility of a younger sibling throughout the day. The children help prepare meals and keep to a steady home-schooling schedule. Group studies include materials from Advanced Training Institute International, a Bible-based education program for families.

The Duggars’ daily adventures are currently being chronicled in a television series on the Discovery Health channel. They previously participated in another Discovery Health series, “On the Road with 16 Kids.”

While some would say this is a remarkable thing, and laud the family that manages to stay together, I wonder just how happy each child is. From purely a non-monetary standpoint, how much quality time can be spent by each parent with a child, alone, before the time runs out? Rearing children in group session may yield healthy children physically, but how can the children ever believe they are somehow ’special’ when all else points to being just another body in a production line? 

What about those 9 vehicles? Allowing for the use of bio-diesel in all nine, that’s still a massive amount of resources being consumed.

I’ve been aware of many of those families that talk about feeding children on unreasonable amounts of cash each month - each time I have been a witness to such a thing it seems that tons of filler items, and not much nutrition was what was being served.

How prepared are these children to be, as schooling for them all will, without exaggeration, come to total in the millions of dollars? This does not allow for the the time it takes with each child for homework during the formative years.

Some would also question the toll taken on the mother’s body, with so many pregnancies, in such a short time. That is, I believe, her choice, but it wouldn’t speak well for the concept if she died at 45, with so many children yet to be raised.

How can the individual child be that important to a parent, when the greatest concern has to be for all the rest of the family?

Now multiply this by all the various other religious people who believe that having children is the world’s greatest pastime? So much for conservation.

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Tags: conservation, energy crisis, natural resources, group responsibility, religious fervor

Someone is finally waking up to the fact that only hardcore, rabid fans are the ones that completely understand all the designations of the last few crops of nVidia chips. The average Joe, or light enthusiast, is left in the cold, needing to do several minutes, to a couple of hours of research about the graphics chips, the memory, and various other things before the purchase of a video card.

To make things worse, the comparative reviews of video cards are few and far between. Even then, the crafty reviewer, not wishing to offend the company that is giving them a lot of swag, will maneuver better than a rock crawler around some dangerous hills with the wording of the review - seldom is any honest, here-it-is-and-I-hope-you-don’t-like-it review given.

nVidia and ATi (yes, I’ll continue to call them that!) make things worse, by using overlapping numbering schemes, with no alpha designation to help clear confusion. For example, a nVidia 5500 is a faster card than a 6200, but nowhere is it stated clearly that the numbering system is silly - until you look around. It isn’t on the box, it isn’t on the website without much digging. If the user goes to the store to buy a card, the employee is usually a low-paid dolt that is enthusiastic about his job, and his spiff he’ll make when he sells the unit his manager told him to.

Hopefully, that will soon change.

The news comes from the company’s Vice President of Business Content Roy Taylor, in comments made recently to GamesIndustry.biz.

NVidia’s attempt to become more consumer friendly is a challenge it understands must be tackled to broaden its appeal to consumers not yet become acquainted with the brand, which is still linked in most buyers’ minds to graphics cards. Consumers accustomed to low-cost computers are typically de facto users of Intel’s integrated GPUs, and it’s this market that NVidia now wants to crack.

A glimpse of NVidia’s Web site reveals the company has six different desktop lines of video cards, with some lines, including its popular GeForce series having multiple series subsets.

For example, NVidia will launch its GeForce 9900 video card — code name GT200 — series just a few months after launching the 9800 GXT graphics card, and the 9900 GTX will likely replace the 9800 GX2 in the future. Last month, NVidia re-announced its GeForce 9800 GX2 to accompany the GeForce 9800 GTX and GeForce 9600 GT GPUs.

NVidia has yet to release a roadmap for when this consolidation will begin taking place.

The Santa Clara-based company’s internal product range modifications will come at a time when its first quarter profits rose 34% but still missed analyst outlooks. After Q1 ended on April 27, NVidia reported income of $176.8 million, or 30 cents per share, but financial analysts anticipated stock profit of 38 cents per share.

NVidia remains in control of the GPU market at present, with AMD still having difficulty benefitting from its 2006 purchase of ATI. Recently, Intel and NVidia have traded barbs, with an Intel engineer claiming during the Intel Developer Forum that discrete graphics cards will eventually become “unnecessary” for consumers.

“The better question to ask is this…’Moving forward will there be a need for a high-end CPU?’…probably not,” NVidia Director of Public Relations Derek Perez boldly predicted shortly afterward.

In other articles, and statements, clarification will soon be the thing that will help the average Joe determine his need for the product. It seems as though the chest thumping will be left to Mr. Ballmer, as the heads at nVidia are stopping to use some sound marketing techniques.

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Tags: nvidia, ati, graphics chips, marketing plans, customer confusion

Over on ExtremeTech, Loyd Case talks about his distressing result with Norton Antivirus, and the scheme for activation. It seems he has had good luck with the product until recently. I have not used any Norton products since 2003, which, coincidentally, was the last year of the product needing no ridiculous activation scheme.

Mr. Case states

Until a couple of years ago, I’d never been much of a user of antivirus software. Mostly, it was because I had been lucky. After getting a broadband connection and finding a worm on my home network, though, I decided it was time to bite the bullet.

PC Magazine has always rated Norton Antivirus [NAV] highly, so I bought it for the first time back in 2002. Actually, I bought Symantec ’s Norton SystemWorks 2002, but eventually unloaded everything except the antivirus software. It worked great. It was unobtrusive, mostly compatible with the PC games I used, and saved my bacon several times as various e-mail viruses made the rounds. Later, I upgraded to the 2003 version — mostly so I could get rid of the remaining detritus left behind by SystemWorks.

As my one-year virus definitions subscription drew to a close, it was only natural to upgrade to the 2004 version. I suppose I could have just paid for another year’s subscription, but “newer is better”, eh? Actually, some of the new features called out in PC Magazine’s review sounded useful. Symantec’s move to product activation was somewhat worrisome, but I’d grown comfortable with product activation in Windows XP, as well as a couple of high end applications, so I wasn’t too concerned.

I bought Norton Antivirus on August 26th, installed it, configured it, and promptly forgot about it. Occasionally, NAV would pop up a message telling me it had automatically downloaded new antivirus definitions. It also caught a couple of Web-based Trojans, as well as some e-mail virus attachments. All in all, I was reasonably content.

Have you ever seen those horror movies where everything is wonderful at the beginning of the movie, then little hints foreshadow the nightmare to come? That’s what happened here. My happy tale of antivirus success started coming unglued, a little at a time.

It began when I decided to manually check for a new set of definitions, as we got word of one of the numerous worms that began making the rounds in the fall. Norton refused to update, instead giving me a relatively obscure error and a link to their support site. The support page told me that NAV was either not activated or had encountered an activation problem. The fix was to reinstall. So I uninstalled and reinstalled. Of course, this step required re-activation, but Symantec seemed to accept this with no problems.

For awhile, things seemed good. The world was a happy place, and the time bomb that was NAV sat happily in my system tray. Then, like some evil boarding house resident, it began nagging at me. The NAV icon would have a little “x” in it, indicating it wasn’t working. Occasionally, it would pop up and tell me that the evaluation period had expired and I needed to activate. On all these occasions, I just clicked on the “Activate” button, the app would activate, and things would be good again.

Last Friday, NAV popped up again and asked me to reactivate. I clicked the “activate” button again, but this time, I got a message telling me I’d run out of activations. It all but accused me of stealing the software. So I called tech support, and spoke with a very nice person who gave me an interesting link to the Symantec Web site.

In case you don’t want to pay Symantec a visit, here’s the salient paragraph from their document ID 2003093015493306 (dated October 31st, 2003):

Situation:

You install Norton AntiVirus 2004 (NAV) and activate the program successfully. However, whenever you restart the computer you are prompted to activate the program again. If you enter the activation code each time, then after a number of restarts you see the message “The trial period has expired. This product has been disabled because you have not activated it.”

Solution:

Symantec is investigating this problem. The cause is unknown, and there is no solution at this time. This document will be updated when new information becomes available or a solution is found. ”

As you can see, the company is aware of the issue. So what’s the fix?

This is a continuing problem, and one I have dealt with on customer’s computers by usually admonishing them to never purchase another Norton product, as no trace of the greatness that once was ‘The Norton Utilities’  remains.  Symantec uses the same tactics as Microsoft, purchasing promising software, and branding it as their own. Sometimes the company totally screws it up, as was done with Norton products, Other times the software is quietly quashed, never to be seen again, as was done with the very fine XTree products and PCTools products. (This is not the PCTools of today, it was a very good alternative to the Norton Utilities back when, and really was very good. The parent company was called Central Point Software, another complete victim of Symantec buyout. I usually purchased both!)

Now, Symantec is getting the great reviews I’m sure they pay for in the big magazines, but everyone I know avoids their products like bubonic plague, and each customer I deal with is, as I was saying above, getting ‘he talk’.

Lotus learned its lesson about copy protection when it lost its status as the number one spreadsheet, while other companies have lost major market share due to convoluted copy protection or activation schemes. In fact, the only one company that hasn’t seen huge drops in its user base is Microsoft, though that is only due to the extreme size of their share of the market. Microsoft is starting to slide due to this, amongst other things, and it will continue to see its share erode as the market moves toward software that is not always trying to ‘catch the user in violation’.

I wonder how many dollars (millions of dollars?) are spent trying to keep one step in front of the latest crack of these activation schemes. Then there is the untold number of people unduly distressed by the problems of activation, when they are legal users of genuine software. Many of these people get tired of the fight, the calls to tech support, and simply switch to something that gives less trouble - even if it is not as effective as the troublesome product replaced.

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Tags: symantec, norton, activation schemes, microsoft, lotus, central point software

Well, for all the troubles Microsoft seems to be having, they still can’t seem to have a decent test cycle before release. It also seems that Microsoft must be 100% Intel, because otherwise someone in the hallowed halls of Redmond might have caught this.

Installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 sends some PCs into an endless series of reboots, according to posts to a Microsoft support forum.

Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft Corp. and a prominent Windows blogger, has worked with users to tentatively identify the problem as involving only machines using processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Messages from frustrated users began accumulating on the XP SP3 support newsgroup Wednesday, just a day after Microsoft released the update to the general public.

“I just installed Windows XP SP3 and after completing the processes and when the system reboots, the system cannot proceed to load the Windows,” said a user identified as “Olin” in a message that kicked off a long thread. “It just displays the flash screen of Windows then after it reboots again.”

Most users who left messages on the forum said that they were unable to boot into Windows Safe mode — a last-ditch way to sidestep the normal boot process for troubleshooting purposes — or revert to a previously saved System Restore point.

Some were understandably upset. “Way to go, Microsoft, releasing the pile of dung called SP3 that hoses your system so bad even Safe Mode isn’t working!” said a user identified as Mike Voss. “Props to your QA guys, they certainly have done their job.”

Johansson, who watched one of his PCs repeatedly  reboot after installing XP SP3, traded accounts with several other users on the newsgroup and summarized the results on his blog.

According to Johansson, there appears to be two separate issues. One affects only AMD-equipped PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard Co. “The problem is that HP, apparently along with other OEMs, deploys the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers,” said Johansson. “Because the image for both Intel and AMD is the same, all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality.”

Running the intelppm.sys driver on an AMD-powered PC isn’t normally an issue, but on the first reboot after a service pack installation, it causes “a big problem,” Johansson said. The machine either fails to boot or crashes and immediately reboots.

The other problem, according to Johansson, also seems to affect only AMD machines, and involves an error message indicating trouble with the PC’s BIOS. Johansson said that the ensuing recommendation to update the BIOS is “most likely not your problem,” but said that the problem may be isolated to a specific motherboard. “Possibly, it is related to computers with the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard in them,” he said.

Johansson also spelled out workarounds for both problems on his blog. The HP issue can be solved by disabling the intelppm.sys driver, while the second fix requires the user to plug in a USB flash drive before booting.

Microsoft was not immediately available for comment early Friday, but someone identified as a Microsoft employee on the support forum had asked users to e-mail him information about the PC’s system configuration and whether they were able to enter Safe mode, and to submit event viewer logs.

This isn’t the first endless reboot problem Microsoft’s faced in relation to a service pack recently. In February, the company pulled a Windows Vista SP1 prerequisite update from automatic delivery because it was crippling some machines.

above from Computerworld

Way to go Microsoft! If that doesn’t get people to make the switch, nothing will! To Vista? No to something that doesn’t have that multicolor flag anywhere to be found.

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Quote of the day:
There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot. - Steven Wright

Tags: microsoft, fubar, xp sp3, amd processor problems, quality control

Yowzah! We can use some of that money, but this stuff gets annoying quickly!

 It’s not bad enough that, after the writer’s strike, many decent and better programs were cancelled, now the mainstream television networks are making us go into game show hell.

Yes, because the CBS network can’t get it together, the incidences of ‘The Price Is Right’ have gone from once a season, to once a week. NBC, not doing well for quite some time, manages to annoy with multiple weeknight forays into the land of ‘Deal or No Deal’. This is similar to the battering we once got on ABC with Regis and ‘Millionaire’.

What is it about these programs that makes the average viewer tune in? Can any of the viewing audience truly say that they identify with these contestants that seem so much less than intelligent and so much more vocal than they ought to be? Do you know anyone, in daily life, that gets so excited when being introduced to the group? Anyone is going to go a little haywire when informed they have just won a huge sum of money - but until the time that announcement is made, a little more decorum is called for. Perhaps some large men in all white uniforms, with jackets that have extra long sleeves, and tie in the back, would help. I would personally love to see one of these vociferous boneheads carried off to ‘Happy Acres” as their grand prize!

Each one of these programs is fine in small, metered amounts. When it becomes a replacement for quality programming, or, just possibly, anything excluding screaming contestants and a jocular host that simply likes the sound of his voice too much, it is time to shoot the television. Just kidding!

No, what it means is that it is time to check out alternate programming. This can be anything from a great documentary on PBS to a replay of a Bond movie on a movie channel.

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Tags: the price is right, deal or no deal, who wants to be a millionaire, network programming, game show hell, contestant cretins

is definitely more obtuse than this triangle!

WindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU.exe  That is the file name that the Microsoft Web site says it is sending to you when you try to download the single computer update to Windows XP Service Pack 3.

What you get is a much longer file name, with the change coming between the ENU and .exe. Nowhere does it say what this might be, and perhaps there is an explanation elsewhere, but it is not readily found. At first I thought it might be some sort of tracking mechanism, but that idea went away when I downloaded the file again, on another computer, to check the theory.

I don’t know why but I then got that ‘light bulb moment’ and thought it was a hash value, so that someone could check to make sure that the file was correctly received.  Well, it wasn’t a CRC-32 or MD5 value, as are commonly used on the internet, but in fact it is a hash. It is an SHA1 value, which is much less commonly used. (BTW, there is a great little applet, called Summer Properties, that will do the CRC-32, MD5, SHA1, and CRC-16 calculations for you when you right click a file and bring up the properties page. It is small, has no crippling or nagging features, and works great. Just put Summer Properties into your friend Google to get it.)

How tough would it be to have a small note giving this information? I thought I might be missing something, so I went back to check, and also looked at the instructions given - not there.

So I wonder, why the secrecy? Do only TechNet members get to know this little tidbit? (I may be making the mistake of assuming that these members are allowed this inner-circle knowledge.) Why the cloak and dagger, Steve?

Senator Ron Wyden, from Oregon, is the regular guy’s friend when it comes to the Internet. He has warned those who would try to wipe out Net Neutrality to think twice about the act. This is a good thing for most of us - that is, those who aren’t counting on their AT&T or Comcast shares to appreciate if the neutrality goes away.

from Ars Technica

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) stepped in front of a group of tech executives in Washington this morning to deliver a caffeinated and surprisingly sharp defense of network neutrality. Pledging to use “every ounce of my energy to protect network neutrality,” Wyden had a message for ISPs who might be pondering new charges for various forms of access: “think twice.” If ISPs start down that road, they might soon find that they lose key legal protections including “safe harbors” and tax freedom

Wyden delivered his ultimatum at a Computer & Communications Industry Association conference in DC, where he cast the entire network neutrality debate in terms of a legislative compromise. Years ago, Congress began protecting ISPs from the twin threats of regulation and taxation; in return, ISPs were expected to deliver an unimpeded connection to the Internet. A move away from a neutral ‘Net would undermine the “very philosophical underpinnings of what we fought for for the last 15 years,” according to Wyden. If that happens, he sees no reason for Congress to continue sheltering ISPs.

The two specific pieces of legislation encompassed by this threat are the Communications Decency Act and the Internet Tax Freedom Act. While much of the CDA was tossed out by a federal judge on the grounds that it unconstitutionally limited free speech, section 230 of the act survived. 230 provided a safe harbor to ISPs and web sites, exempting them from liability for content posted to or through them, a provision that benefits Ars and every other website that allows user-generated content and comments. The law saved ISPs “vast sums,” according to Wyden.

The Internet Tax Freedom Act has also kept most taxes from being applied to Internet connections, even though states have repeatedly shown interest in taxing these links.

In return for helping out ISPs, what did Congress get in return? “Monopolies,” according to Wyden, or, in other cases, duopolies where one or two main gatekeepers controlled access to the ‘Net for most US citizens. Wyden’s rhetoric grew downright militant as he contemplated the various ways that these ISPs might start hitting consumers with fees. “The sword cuts both ways,” he said, implying that the ISPs might find themselves having to collect more taxes and pay for more litigation if they continue to agitate Congress by pondering or implementing non-neutral fees.

Part of the reason that the issue gets so much traction is because network neutrality has become one of those wonky crossover issues that stirs up passions even among normal ‘Net users. Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), speaking at the same event, issued a reminder of how much popular traction the idea has gained: when she goes into high school classrooms, the kids “ask me about ‘Net neutrality,” she said.

With Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) holding an important network neutrality hearing this morning in the House, Eshoo expressed her confidence that Markey’s bill would be taken up by Congress but that it would face a serious challenge on the House floor. Should it fail there, “I think the Capitol would fall down around members’ ears if the opposition were successful,” she said. 

Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) agreed with Eshoo and noted that the two sides are separated by what now seems to be “almost a religious difference.” Doyle chalks up some of the antagonism to a generational divide, as the only people of his generation who grew up using the Internet were the people who invented it. ‘Net neutrality isn’t a “wild plan to destroy the Internet,” Doyle continued, arguing that a younger generation brought up using the Internet understands exactly what’s at stake.

Or, as FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein put it later in the day, “Anyone who messes with the open Internet does so at their peril.”

Swords, peril, wild plans, and a crumbling Capitol; all we need are wild animals in the streets and possibly a rider on a pale horse for the network neutrality debate to officially complete its ascendancy from a network management issue to a millenarian apocalyptic battle cry. Despite the rhetoric on this issue, it looks unlikely that Congress will actually take any action this year.

 

Wow, now who would have thought we would see a senator and the FCC coming out in favor of the right side of an issue? There is hope for the country yet.

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Quote of the day:
Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. - Robert Frost

Tags: net neutrality, congress, fcc, sen. ron wyden

So states a brief from AMD’s lawyers in a court document concerning the lawsuit AMD has had running against Intel, for anti-competitive practices.

AMD has 13% of the processor market currently, which the brief asserts is hurting the company, as corporate entities are always looking for a long term solution, with stability. AMD doesn’t have enough market share to satisfy many CFOs, so Intel gets the nod, based upon market share alone.

The gains made when AMD thwarted Intel’s best efforts, with the Athlon64 and Opteron, in 2003, were simply not enough to sway the corporate buyers. What hurt AMD during the period of performance domination was the inability to deliver enough of the superior chips to the large business concerns whose purchases have lots of trailing zeroes.

from PCWorld

Advanced Micro Devices needs to more than double its share of the microprocessor market to survive, according to a brief filed by the company’s lawyers in its antitrust lawsuit against Intel.

At the end of 2007, AMD had 13 percent of the processor market, “less than half of what it requires to operate long-term as a sustainable business,” the brief said, explaining that Intel’s alleged efforts to shut the company out of the processor business had largely succeeded.

“Measured on a revenue share basis, AMD made little progress growing its slice of the pie,” it said.

The argument that Intel’s alleged anti-competitive behavior has so hurt AMD that its future is in jeopardy is crucial to the company’s claims for relief, including damages. But the claims could further spook corporate customers already wary of the company’s financial troubles.

Companies generally make computer purchasing decisions with a long-term view and plan to use and purchase similar systems for many years to come. Fresh concerns about AMD’s long-term sustainability coupled with existing worries about the company’s fiscal health — weakened by the delayed release of its Quad-Core Opteron processor and mounting long-term debt– could lead CIOs to consider computers based on Intel’s chips instead.

“It will push them in the other direction,” said Rajnish Arora, director of enterprise server and workstation research at IDC Asia-Pacific.

AMD’s brief was heavily redacted by the court and details of Intel’s alleged anti-competitive behavior and its relationship with major computer makers were largely blacked out. But the general thrust of AMD’s argument was clear: Intel allegedly paid computer makers to rely exclusively, or almost exclusively, on its chips.

The effect of these and other alleged tactics employed by Intel outweighed gains that AMD made with its successful line of Opteron server chips, which came out in 2003.

“That AMD gained some share and revenue is immaterial. It gained sufficiently less share and sufficiently less revenue so as to suffer a critical diminishment of its innovation roadmap,” the brief said.

AMD’s concerns about its future are legitimate, IDC’s Arora said, underscoring the capital intensive nature and short product cycles of the processor business. “They are going to be challenged. They need to grow the business and scale it up,” he said.

The key for AMD is to generate strong end user demand for its processors, which will in turn mean more computer makers will sell systems based on its chips. “It’s all driven by customer demand,” Arora said.

 

Perhaps a little thought, when building a new computer, to how things might be if Intel becomes the only big supplier of CPUs would be good. Not only would pricing suffer, the scale and scope of innovation would suffer, as Intel would feel no pressure to get something better in the retail pipeline. The Core 2 series of chips can be directly shown as a response to the smackdown AMD put on Intel with the Athlon64s.

What seems strange is that no thinking in the other direction is done - that is, corporate purchasing seldom is done on the basis of all-out performance, but value is a big concern. When outfitting thousands of machines, solid performance with reasonable cost is what is desired. AMD has always offered value, never more than when its top performing chips were outpacing Intel’s and still offered at lower cost.

This is why the new mandate at AMD seems to be to have a CPU series available for a longer period, so that upgrades can be made by large entities over time.

I’m betting AMD is wishing that the dollars used to purchase ATi was, instead, used to build a another fabrication plant, which could help push the much needed volume for AMD to recover and survive.

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Quote of the day:
The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those which he didn’t commit when he had the opportunity. - Helen Rowland

Tags: amd, intel, ati, market share, anti-competitive practices, athlon64, opteron, phenom, monopoly