Posts by stc

Apple tablet will 'redefine print,' says rumor mill

why??

how dumb; why do people want this? when i buy a book, i feel like i am adding a treasured item to my library that will outlive me. if i wanted it to be ephemeral, i'd just go to the library. no point in paying probably like a thousand dollars for something rigid that you can't just toss around and furthermore requires a charging unit! and then to pay on top of that good money for virtual texts, that are gone when your disk fails or revoked when the vendor doesn't feel like you should have them anymore. no thanks. and digitizing textbooks, that is a tragedy. i have tons of interesting old textbooks on all kinds of subjects that i have gotten out of free piles at my local university or for pennies on the dollar through ebay, abebooks, or amazon used. some of these books are fifty, seventy-five years old. some are seminal classics in their field. that's never going to happen when print goes digital. i guess if people want to buy this thing for being a tablet pc in and of itself, that's one thing, but i don't get the ebooks fad. and i don't think i'm the only one; there was a lot of hype when the kindle first came out but i think now that the novelty has worn away, folks are finding them wanting compared to the real thing.

Explosive French workers threaten second factory

love it

i love the french. they've got probably the last remaining nation in the west where the people aren't afraid to stand up and fight for what's right against the government and big business. pity we don't have more of that sort of sentiment in this so-called "land of the free". we might actually have some of our freedoms left if we did!

Sun killing 'Rock' Sparc chip?

end of an era

that's a shame; rock sounded quite exciting and i understand it was getting fairly close to production. certainly not off in vaporware land like ultrasparc V was. i think this announcement marks nothing less than the end of sun microsystems as an independent hardware designer. soon enough sun will be nothing more than a name plate on a generic intel box, but i suppose it's been going that way for a while.

i'll just keep on running my old ultrasparcs as long as i can get away with it.

incidentally, the ultrasparc II wasn't really a paragon of a successful hardware launch. yes sun was flush with cash and riding high back in the .com boom but certainly the early ultrasparc II processors had some hardware issues e.g. with caches that really drove a lot of customers crazy back then. the story is not all roses but it is true that the ultrasparc II did eventually turn into a very solid performer albeit somewhat uncompetitive in terms of raw performance versus its contemporaries.

really, in retrospect, i wouldnt say that sparc really ever had the edge in terms of pure performance. even the early sparc risc chips were not vastly more powerful than cisc contenders like the 68040 and early mips processors, and the ultrasparc was often bested in straight benchmarks by the alpha and power2. what always did it for me with sun is that they had a good all around package with excellent hardware reliability (imho; stop laughing!) and performance that while not eye popping was always acceptable.

Old guard want to save Nortel

cool

hopeful news; i don't think very highly of their ethernet and IP gear but the DMS central office switches and the Meridian PBX line are fine products. i'd much rather see an independent nortel concentrating on what they do well versus getting picked over by vultures. when i heard that siemens was looking at picking up the nortel enterprise communications business, all i was thinking about is what they ended up doing with rolm. what a waste.

Network giants reject 'buy American' Obama mandate

sad but true

it would be hilarious if we weren't stuck in the middle of it.. it is impossible to fulfill provisions of the legislation requiring american manufacture, since nothing is actually made in america any longer. glad to see this issue get a little press, but we all know they will in the end get their exemptions. after all, what choice is there? the guys from cisco and ALU arent kidding. there probably isnt a vendor in the network business that manufactures equipment in the us these days. and really, how is ALU even considered to be an american company anymore?