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.

If we're going to say that drone strikes are ok, then what's the difference whether they happen on US soil or not? It's an awfully arbitrary delineation to say that this technology should only be used against bad guys if they happen to reside on foreign soil.

If you believe the use of military drones are ok, then why not have them patrolling the skies wherever you suspect bad guys are hiding out?

Well, it's a slippery slope from there to Eugenics.

What makes you think that our rightful genetic destiny must be toward smarter and smarter human beings? We may have reached a point where evolutionarily, we're already as smart as we're likely ever to get due to pressures that you nor I can completely comprehend. What we're starting to understand is that evolution proceeds in fits and starts and many dead ends toward a somewhat unpredictable concept of 'fittest'.