The Industry Standard - Comments

Amazon just cut the price of

Ian Lamont — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:17:27 -0700

Amazon just cut the price of its Kindle 2 device (not the DX) by 17%, from $359 to $299:

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-amazon-drops-kindle-2-price-to-299/

This suggests that a DX discount may be in the offing, but if it drops to $399 that won't be enough to satisfy the criteria for judgment.

Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
twitter.com/the_standard

A relatively sudden

Ian Lamont — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:24:08 -0700

A relatively sudden surprise:

EMC wins bidding war for Data Domain

"Data Domain said Wednesday it has signed a definitive merger agreement with EMC and terminated its previously announced merger deal with NetApp. Data Domain said it paid NetApp a $57 million termination fee under terms of that agreement."

I was just reading in the WSJ this morning about EMC getting regulatory clearance. I guess all of the earlier talk about "West Coast culture" did not play out in NetApp's favor.

Judged accordingly.

Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
twitter.com/the_standard

JZ, Many 'internet artists'

JV — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:26:23 -0700

JZ,

Many 'internet artists' would love to think the etoy/eToy debacle played a part in eToys' demise. I was employed by eToys during the so-called sit-in and the servers handled the huge spike just fine. Once they implemented my idea of protecting the CGIs by referring URL (something I learned in the pr0n industry), the sit-in was a non-issue for us. We manned the servers 24x7 in 3 8hr shifts and the site never experienced any 'server not responding' error messages.

By contrast, toysrus.com's 1998 Christmas season was a disaster. Trying to acces their site generated a cycle of error pages. I'm paraprasing, but "Our site is busy accepting orders, please try again later" is one of the messages I remember quite clearly.

Yes, there were millions of junk records insered into the Sequent servers running Oracle, but not once did they fail or become unusable.

So you can put that theory to rest.

As others have stated, we spent too much, too fast. More detrimental for the '99 season was the Toy'r'Us/Amazon partnership. They had an established site, Amazon coupled to an established brick and mortar that was difficult to compete with. Sales were affected due to the pitch that you could buy online and return at any ToysRUs store for credit or exchange. That's something we could not claim.

no data for iphone on

Leung — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:46:35 -0700

no data for iphone on prepaid plans with AT&T Go Phones

I'm in the US from Hong Kong and brought my not-locked iPhone with me. To avoid paying roaming charges, I decided to go to an ATT store for a prepaid card & added the data service ($20 for 100MB). The phone worked fine, but not data. The message on the phone was "Could not activate cellular data network: You are not subscribed to the cellular data service". I spent about 45 minutes in the store with the sales guy, then on the phone with first with customer service then with technical support. I was told twice on the phone that ATT identifies iPhones on the network and will not let them connect for data unless there is contract. They refunded the data part of my card. Will try T-Mobile next if I can find a store.

Mcadwell...my son just got

danny fallen — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:46:11 -0700

Mcadwell...my son just got the dreaded red ring, our warranty has run out and he has already sent this machine in once during the warranty period for the red ring. Did anyone ever reply to you with the attorney information? I would appreaciate any help you give us, thank you in advance, Danny

It's NOT free, it costs TIME

JT — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:16:12 -0700

It's NOT free, it costs TIME and EFFORT. As a kid, those things are meaningless as kids have an excess of both (at least I did) but as an adult I have way more money than I have time. I am on my 4th, YES 4th, XBOX 360. Sure, M$ graciously replaced each one in a mere 6 weeks, so that's 1/2 a year cumulative "down" time. By the way, just went to play Fable2 today and bam, RROD. No way can I say this is "free" or acceptable.

How do I get on to Facebook,

Irene — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:08:46 -0700

How do I get on to Facebook, and hear from my friends??

TechCrunch sources suggest

Ian Lamont — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:21:57 -0700

TechCrunch sources suggest an iPod Touch with a camera is in the works:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/06/prepare-yourself-for-ipod-video/

Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
twitter.com/the_standard

EMC ups the

Ian Lamont — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:48:51 -0700

EMC ups the ante:

http://bit.ly/NzHKA

Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
twitter.com/the_standard

It appears to me that HP has

Tim — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:34:51 -0700

It appears to me that HP has reduced the amount of ink in there replacement print cartages by a bunch to increase sales of cartages.

Quote: "How many rim devices

Nick — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:44:38 -0700

Quote:
"How many rim devices are we counting vs "ONE" iPhone? Plus IDC and NPD doesn't count Wal-mart in their estimates which iPhone just launched. Also blackberry devices are on multiple carriers. Not to mention apple could include the touch in these numbers since it is an iPhone without the phone"

Well you can't really include an mp3 player in a smart phone comparison because...its not a phone. To obvious a flaw in your argument? Clearly not for fanboys.

Don't tell them you heard it

hum — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 09:56:34 -0700

Don't tell them you heard it from me...
I have a friend working in the trenches of Verizon and there is ALREADY a CDMA Iphone that they are testing RIGHT NOW.

Now as you know Apple (and maybe Verizon) are very careful about thoroughly testing their stuff before they release it. (I wish the Microsoft folks would do this before releasing buggy versions of Windows.)

Anyway the phone is done, they could have released it this year but are being responsible regarding the testing.

Bottom line:
You will see the Verizon Iphone in 2010

"Even if Rock had made it to

David — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:20:46 -0700

"Even if Rock had made it to market, it would have been an uninteresting processor as companies like Intel and AMD are offering high-performance chips at more reasonable prices, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research."

Suggesting 'Rock' is "uninteresting" is beyond comprehension.

The UltraSPARC RK or 'Rock' processor by Sun Microsystems is interesting to Computer Scientists, who have worked for decades to speed single threaded performance. Sun implemented many of those theories in 'Rock' silicon such as:
- thread level parallelism
- thread level speculation
- transactional memory
- out-of-order retirement
- deferred queue

'Rock' is a very interesting processor in the academic world since companies like Intel and AMD have not recently pioneered computer science technologies in silicon to optimize single threaded applications. Implementations of theory in real silicon are very important to review academic thoughts and determine future implications. Implementations like 'Rock' are studied for decades.

'Rock' is a very interesting processor for business, military, and academia system performance of single thread bound applications - software threads on 'Rock' runs with very few of the painfully long waits on slow memory due to cache misses, commonly experienced with Intel and AMD processors. People who purchase systems expect their systems to be doing work, instead of sitting around idle.

'Rock' is a very interesting processor in the commercial world since accelerating existing single thread-bound software allow for acceleration of existing software (which does not scale well with multiple threads) - something the major CPU developers (AMD and Intel) in rest of the market have abandoned. If a single thread is the problem, newer CPU's from other vendors will not solve their performance problem, increase the thread bottlenecked performance, and increase the business profitability.

'Rock' is a very interesting processor in the investment community. The release of Rock would enable Sun to pioneer another niche, abandoned by the other vendors (single threaded performance.) Filling niches has proven to be very profitable for Sun and investors. Sun had pioneered the niche of multi-threaded hardware with the release of their 32 hardware thread UltraSPARC T1 processor - driving proprietary vendors (Intel, AMD) to change their road maps and start seriously threading their CPU's... projects to speed existing single-threaded applications are non-existent today. The release of Rock would enable Sun to pioneer this lost niche, abandoned by the other vendors. Filling niches are very profitable to investors in those technologies.

'Rock' is very interesting to the environmentally conscience consumer. Very little work has been done recently in the market to increase the performance of single threaded software, with the exception of increasing clock rate, which drives up the costs to consumers in: hardware, cooling, and power consumption. Rock has been the exception - targeting increased single threaded performance without aggressively increasing clock rate and the negatives that go along with it.

'Rock' is interesting to the businesses which are consolidating locations. In conjunction with increasing the speed of existing hardware threads making thread-bound applications run faster - with the number of threads per-processor going to 4 to 16, the number of servers required to consolidate multiple locations are reduced to a quarter of the platforms.

Interesting is clearly not the problem with 'Rock'. If there is a problem with 'Rock' - the consumer community will need to wait for something more than a rumor.

I have the go phone and i

gary — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:23:08 -0700

I have the go phone and i took the sim card out and inserted it into my iphone 3g and it works fine

Good

lee — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:45:00 -0700

Good