Hopefully someone will listen to their complaint before they are forced to take matters into their own hands.

And I think everyone also sees the next step, which is retaliation. Google just bought all those Motorola patents, and having them shut down Nokia and Apple with all those 17-year-old cell phone patents would really be a step up in the Mutually-Assured-Destruction conflict, and everyone would suffer for it.

Taking this approach with the nukes in your back pocket seems much more civil than approach taken by the others.

Absolutely correct.

And the reason for these higher-bandwidth DDR chips is not to keep CPUs fed - it's for feeding the newly-integrated bandwidth-hungry on-die GPUs.

CPU performance these days is usually more tied to latency than bandwidth, and since the memory+cache subsystem is already quite fast new modules make little difference.

Yes, the market is ripe for revolution, but it won't happen unless Apple convinces the car makers to let them do it, or build their own car.

The percentage of people who replace factory stereos today is the lowest it's ever been, and that's because the quality and features included in factory stereos has never been higher. Also thanks to integration game, most factory stereos do more than just play music. If you remove your factory stereo you might lose other important features in the process.

Unless Apple makes a move to offer a scalable, mufti-function OEM solution that car makers can customize and ship with pride, the best that's going to happen is people will continue to use the iPod/iPhone integration already included in many factory decks.

Go for the gold...

Go for the gold...

Go for the ...aww, he missed!

Says the guy, who probably slashed his fingers taking out ISA, PCI or AGP cards from his custom made tower PC.

Your point? Expansion slots are about the ability to customize, not about your computer arriving in a 1500-piece puzzle set box. OEM computers come set-up for you, and expansion slots give you the power to customize...they don't REQUIRE you to do anything with them.

IKEA is targeting this thing at idiots who don't give a shit about technology or image quality and just want something pretty that "just works," and yet there will probably be "assembly required." Does this sound like sane marketing to you?

but it lags in performance by an order of magnitude.

This is just not true. A single channel of Thunderbolt does 10Gbps bi-directional. A single channel of USB 3 does 4.0 Gbps bi-directional. That's a factor of 2.5x, not 10x.

And yes, thanks to the new bi-directional bus (USB 2 was shared) USB 3 can already reach 2.5 Gbps in real-world tests. Also being introduced right now are improved UASP (SCSI scheduling) protocols to utilize the same percentage of the bus as Firewire did. Support for UASP is already shipping in products like Asmedia controllers and Intel's 70-series chpsets.

If Intel is going to push it, it'll catch on. So far they haven't, but looks like that may change.

I can't see them pushing it with any zeal now that the 70-series chipsets feature native USB 3. It doesn't help that Intel has also shipped the best USB 3 controller in existence. When USB 3 satisfies your average user's high-speed expansion needs, there's not much reason for Thunderbolt on mainstream platforms.

Thunderbolt silicon probably won't be integrated anytime soon (adding cost), and the $50 active cables aren't helping things (you can get 6-foot USB 3 cables for around 10 bucks). Given that USB 3 is now universal on all mainstream PCs sold, it's going to be hell justifying the extra cost of Thunderbolt.

I always wondered why it took WDC over two years to design the thing. Guess I know now!

I found it strange because Intel managed to produce the 8086 (similar in complexity) in less time, and this was while Intel was distracted with the already-delayed iAPX 432, which was their feature product. The late release of the 65C816 meant it was all but forgotten as the market moved on to the 286 and 68000 series.

He's not. That's Chuck Peddle's baby.

He did allow Chuck to design the Commodore PET, but this was only after Chuck witnessed the Apple prototype and finally convinced Jack that the calculator market was dead.

Jack was a smart businessman who could run a tight ship, but he was a poor prognosticator of the tech industry. Most of his products he pushed were derivatives made more efficiently, and he (and Commodore management once the company grew) had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the next big new thing.

Hell, the legendary Commodore 64 chipset was only as amazing as it was because Jack wanted a game console. Never mind the fact that the console market was saturated, at the VIC-20 was the same price - Jack wanted to be the best console maker, and that was that. And when the console market caved he was left with a game chipset, and he still had to be convinced by an internal team of the best engineers at Commodore to turn it into a product.

Yes, this book details Jack purposefully not paying suppliers, nice to hear it repeated from someone first-hand. According to the book they made a point of not paying suppliers, especially if they were interested in acquiring the company. When the company was cash-strapped and desperate, Commodore would buy them out.

It made more money on the short-term, but was bad for the long-run because it burned bridges in the industry. This made it hard for Jack to get now-wary suppliers and dealers to help him grow his business when he saw an opportunity for a new market/device.