The reason you can tell the difference between looking outside and your monitor has more to do with your monitor's limited color gamut, dynamic range and contrast ratio than pixel density. Beyond a certain density, you need a much bigger screen to appreciate the extra pixels.

And my eyes can barely make out the width of a pixel as it is. What is it going to do for me if you increase pixel density such that pixel are now a quarter the size they are now? Give us 40" or more, and it might start to get interesting, but then you're constantly bending your neck to read what's on different parts of the screen.

Anyone remember that phone? That's the one where Blackberry (RIM) decided to get in on the touchscreen craze by building a phone that tried to bridge the gap for users who preferred physical keyboards. In response to physical keyboard users who clamored for tactile feedback, they made the whole screen click when you pressed hard enough.

At the time, I thought to myself, "no, you idiots, an entire screen that clicks doesn't provide the same tactile feedback as individually raised keys that click under your fingers. What were you guys thinking when you came up with this partial solution to the wrong problem?"

This time around, I'm thinking to myself (and the Slashdot community), "no, you idiots, adding a start icon to the desktop so that users can get to Metro doesn't address the underlying problem that Metro is not appropriate on non-touchscreen desktop PCs. What were you guys thinking when you came up with this partial solution to the wrong problem?"

If this was a previous generation where AMD was actually still competitive, Titan would have been the high end part, and it would have cost $500 instead of $1000. The part known as GTX 780 would have been a slightly depopulated part capable of 90% the performance for a 20% savings or so and the rest of the line would have fallen under those two. Since AMD is no longer really a threat in the high-end GPU space, Nvidia can literally maintain the MSRPs of the old parts as if the new parts are merely higher performing extensions of the previous generation without any downward pricing pressure on anything.

Well evidently if he's lamenting not going with his gut, he's implying that there *was* a viable path to producing mobile chips and they *chose* not to risk their desktop/server business in pursuit of it.

What this story tells me is that while your gut instinct may or may not be offering you the best path forward, you owe it to yourself as a business leader to figure out why your gut contradicts the data. If all you do is make logical decisions based on easily available data, then you can probably be replaced by a simple algorithm that can make more reliable decisions than you anyway.

In this case, Otellini had data in front of him, but his gut instinct contradicted the data-driven path forward. He ignored it and moved on, convinced that it was safer (?) to be on the side of the data. But the data led him astray. Why?

Because he had partial data, data that was probably focused on previous mobile computing entries and little on Apple's recent design successes, superior user experiences and marketing capabilities. If he'd realized his gut was really signalling that they needed more and different kinds of data, I suspect Intel would have gone down a different path.

Really? The version number thing again? Hasn't that been played out yet? Incidentally, 3.0 is not even close to when they moved to a rapid release cycle.

...but I can pretty much guess where this is going. If you look at the massive parallelization improvements we've witnessed among supercomputers over the past couple decades, you can predict that at some point, most of the low hanging fruit would eventually be picked at which point the underlying latency between interconnects would start to become a limiting factor. Couple that with the fact that there's been a complete lack of significant performance improvement in desktop/server CPU space in say the past 5 years and you can predict that it wouldn't be long before we'd see a leveling off of the supercomputer performance curve.

So basically a Facebook 'like' button for scientific papers? Hmmm, not a bad idea.

1. As much as they need to re-think the whole Metro implementation for users without touchscreen hardware, from what I've read they are *NOT* bringing back the old desktop Start Menu, they are simply putting an icon in the familiar place to get to Metro. Metro is still the place where you will launch programs/apps from... and I will continue to bypass it altogether with Classic Shell on my desktop PC. I don't need a complete context change just to open a command prompt, control panel or start programs. Perhaps surprising to MS, I prefer to do my computing at a desk with a 24" non-touchscreen monitor, and I will not be replacing it anytime soon just so that I can bend forward and reach across the keyboard to smudge a hidden menu with my index finger.

2. As we all know, the 100 million licenses sold BS is just that. MS is conflating OEM licenses shipped with actual users actively purchasing and/or using Windows 8 software. They can pull this off because Windows is the de facto shipping OS on virtually all PC hardware. It is obviously to their advantage to maintain this sleight of hand, so don't expect them to get honest any time soon.

Most of the major AV software suites utilize some form of behavioral heuristics to detect unknown threats. I'm not saying it's 100%, but you'd be surprised how effective it can be if implemented right.

Ok, but Haswell delivers virtually nothing computing performance-wise over a reasonably overclocked Sandy Bridge which is a full tick-tock cycle earlier.

Haswell parts are expected to be 10-15% faster than Ivy Bridge, which was itself barely any faster than Sandy Bridge.

Anyone remember the days when computing performance doubled or even tripled between generations?

I have a desktop PC running a Sandy Bridge i5-2500K running at a consistent 4.5GHz (on air). At this rate, it could be another couple generations before Intel has anything worthwhile as an upgrade... I suspect that discrete-GPU-buying home PC enthusiasts are going to continue to be completely ignored going forward while Intel continues to focus on chips for tablets and ultrabooks.

http://www.passmark.com/ftp/antivirus_win8-performance-testing-ed1.pdf

Look, PC sales are on the decline. This we all know. So MS decided to tackle tablets in a big, audacious way in order to increase their relevance in the post-PC era. And it might have worked...

HAD THEY NOT BEEN SO ARROGANT AS TO REMOVE THE GODDAMNED START MENU AND FORCED OLD PC HARDWARE TO USE THEIR TOUCHSCREEN UI!

Seriously, how difficult would it have been to do a quick hardware check upon install and say "hmmm, it looks like you have a keyboard, mouse and non-touchscreen monitor. Let's make Metro an icon on the classic desktop and boot to explorer.exe with a mouse-friendly start menu by default."

Personally, I think Windows 8 offers several welcome improvements over Win7. I installed the OS, downloaded and configured Classic Shell, and haven't so much as whiffed a Metro screen in at least 2 months on my PC. It's great for me, but I'm not your average Windows user! The masses are clueless and if you give them enough reason to dislike your product, you're doomed.

MS, you successfully borrowed Steve Jobs' arrogant decision-making skills, but failed to deliver on the other half of the equation: an overall better user experience.