Posts by Mingy

Keep up the pressure on the telcos, Canada

Hard to believe

That Canada once had global leading telecommunications infrastructure. 20 years of incompetent and/or corrupt (I prefer to believe my politicians are corrupt than stupid) we don't even rival the 3rd world.

By the way the 20% of rural Canadians are not in "polar bear and no roads" type places. Most of us are within 100 km of a major city and a few km of a town.

Regardless, we somehow managed to provide almost everybody with electricity and telephone service at a time when infrastructure was build by men with shovels.

Perhaps the politicians were a tad less corrupt, or realized serving the country was important, back then.

Disk death: Three-quarters of PCs will run SSDs by 2020

Why does anybody pay for Gartner research? If they had to dramatically revise their HDD forecast 7 times over the past few years it's pretty clear they have no understanding of the HDD industry.

How much faster is a quantum computer than your laptop?

Get back to me if, as, and when, Dwave solves a commercially relevant problem

Researchers using Dwave have a remarkable capacity of testing the machine against non-optimized competition.

Let us know know if they ever solve a commercially relevant problem several orders of magnitude faster than the same dollar value of traditional computing running an optimized algorithm.

Semi-suckalicious semiconductor sales

Geez. Don't Write About Things You Don't Understand

SEMI has *nothing* to do with chip sales. It is only about Semiconductor Capital Equipment sales.

Besides which, a book to bill ratio is completely meaningless: the *only* thing that matters about SEMI's book to bill is the bookings trend. Because a book to bill is a ratio, a ratio > 1 just means the number on top is bigger than the number on the bottom. So, if shipments (billings) are collapsing at a slightly faster pace than orders (bookings), then book to bill is > 1.

As it happens, demand for Semiconductor Capital Equipment *is* collapsing, and thats all that matters.

The editors should pull this piece and replace it with a comment written by somebody who at least knows something about these data. This is an embarassment.