I don't work in a data center. But I think you might want to look at an HP Proliant MicroServer.

Basically it is an AMD laptop chipset on a tiny motherboard in a cunningly designed compact enclosure. The SATA drives go into carriers that are easily swapped (but not hot-swappable). It's quiet and power-efficient. It supports ECC memory (max 8GB) and supports virtualization.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06b/15351-15351-4237916-4237918-4237917-4248009-5153252-5153253.html?dnr=1

Silent PC Review did a complete review of an older model (with a 1.3 GHz Turion instead of 1.5 GHz).

http://www.silentpcreview.com/HP_Proliant_MicroServer

SRP is $350, but Newegg has it for $320 (limit 5 per customer).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107052

Newegg also has 8GB of ECC RAM for about $55, so you can get one of these and max its RAM for under $400.

I just got one and haven't had time to really wring it out, but I did do the RAM upgrade. Despite the tiny enclosure, it wasn't too painful to work on it, and I was impressed by the design. The Turion dual-core processor has a passive heat sink on it, and the single large fan on the back pulls air through to cool everything. (There is also a tiny high-speed fan on the power supply.)

I'm going to use this as my personal mail server. It's cheap enough and small enough that I plan to have at least one put away as a hot spare; if the server dies, I'll power it down, move the hard drives to the spare, and I'll have the mail server back up within 5 minutes. Not bad for a cheap little box.

http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf52

I found the above list because I was searching for information on a story I read and enjoyed, "The Mathenauts". The basic idea is that it is possible to travel into a universe or dimension of pure math, and discover new mathematics by exploration. Some of the explorers don't come back; the chief danger is to lose yourself in the math and never return to our reality. You become imaginary, or something like that.

Check out this link: http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/tablets/why-the-ipad-3-regressed-in-battery-life/232602960

To achieve the mind-boggling quad-XGA resolution of 2048 by 1536 pixels using the display technology available today, Apple had to more than double the power draw of the LED backlight that lights up the iPad screen. According to DisplayMate, Apple had to bump up the backlight power draw from 2.7 watts on the iPad 2 to 7 watts on the new iPad.

As DisplayMate explains it, that huge bump in power consumption in the LED backlight was caused by the use of amorphous silicon type LCD panels whose transistors block out more light when pixel density increases. The iPhone 4 in contrast has even higher pixel density--but its use of low temperature polysilicon (LTPS) technology makes the iPhone 4 more than twice as energy efficient per square inch to achieve the same brightness as the new iPad. The problem is that LTPS technology is expensive and would not have been practical for a screen as big as the new iPad's. A new display technology called indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) has the benefit of better energy efficiency at a competitive price, but IGZO isn't ready for mass production.

This means we are both correct. The majority of power use is just to light the display, and with a Retina, more power is needed.

But technology is on the horizon that should someday permit a Retina display that doesn't need as much brightness and thus saves power.

Also note that Apple has people paying $2500 and up for the Mac Pro, and $1000 and up for laptops. But mobile devices are closer to $500, and the Android competition is hitting the $200 price point.

There just isn't as much room to pay top dollar prices for Intel parts in the mobile space.

So even if Intel mobile x86 parts are slightly faster than the ARM chips, will Intel be happy selling at prices competitive with ARM prices? History suggests "no". The cheapest Atom chips are around $20 but Intel makes those suck, just as much as Intel can get away with.

Intel is the master of segmenting markets. Different chips at different price points have different features enabled. Cheaper chips are as crippled as possible, to encourage you to buy a more expensive chip. For example, Intel doesn't support virtualization features on their less-expensive chips; and Intel mostly reserves support for ECC RAM to only the Xeon processors.

(In contrast, AMD puts full functionality in all their parts; they are #2 and they are trying harder to please the customer. That is how you can get an HP Proliant MicroServer with a 1.5 GHz dual-core AMD Turion processor for $320 at Newegg, with full support for virtualization and ECC RAM. I cannot imagine a MicroServer with equal or better Intel parts hitting that price point.)

Intel will try to balance the functionality it allows into the mobile chips against the price it can get. Apple just wants the best chips for the cheapest price. These two goals are not in alignment.

Intel wants to be the only company that can meet your needs. That way, they can make you pay premium prices for their chips. This is perfectly understandable; that is what is best for Intel.

Apple wants to be vertically integrated. They want full control over everything they do. Partly this is so they can keep as much as possible of the money they collect; partly this is so that they can guarantee excellent quality and excellent availability. This is what is best for Apple, and it isn't bad for their customers either.

Intel does not want to become just another ARM source, competing on price with all the others. But Apple will never lock themselves in to depending on Intel for mobile chips, when ARM chips have been shown to be more than adequate. And Apple would not be investing in custom ARM chips if it was planning to adopt Intel mobile chips.

People keep pointing out that Intel's mobile x86 chips are competitive with ARM. That won't cut it. Intel's chips would have to be better, and so much better that the risk of depending on Intel is worth it.

That was the case for the PowerPC to x86 transition! Intel's chips were so much better than PowerPC for laptops that it was worth getting into an entangling relationship with Intel. AMD was not able to guarantee delivery of the massive quantities of chips Apple was planning to sell, and Intel was, so AMD wasn't really an option... but at least they served to keep Intel from trying to charge totally outrageous prices for their chips; there was always a credible threat of going to AMD.

Hmm. It's looking like AMD is going to crater in spectacular fashion soon. I wonder if Apple will make a serious attempt to buy what's left of the company. That would enable Apple to make its own x86 chips! Eh, probably not. AMD is behind Intel on process, so switching to AMD chips would mean taking a hit on performance, power use, or both.

The "SemiAccurate" web site thinks that Apple will transition to using ARM chips for laptops, not just for mobile devices, once ARM chips are good enough (which they will be soon). So, transitioning away from x86 and to, say, multi-core 64-bit ARM chips is another way Apple can untangle from Intel.

Apple may not be in a big hurry to actually complete the transition away from Intel chips; just a credible threat of switching to ARM chips might be enough to negotiate good prices on x86 chips. That would leave lower power consumption as the main reason to go to ARM, but a laptop's display is probably the worst power drain, especially with a Retina display.

steveha

Charlie is an armchair CEO of AMD, and his analysis is about as accurate as the name of his website suggests.

He is an analyst; his job is to write analyses. He has been rather harsh on AMD, but then he has been harsh on Intel and harsh on nVidia also.

His predictions about Ultrabooks from a year ago were accurate. (He said they were overpriced and wouldn't sell well.)

I'm actually hoping that his current predictions of doom for AMD won't come true. What he wrote was "if the planned layoffs happen, AMD is doomed"; there is at least a tiny chance that maybe the planned layoffs won't actually happen.

If the layoffs are as he describes, then I'll join him in predicting doom for AMD. AMD has no future without its engineers. The plan to outsource engineering for the video cards strikes me as insane; there is an old saying, "You can't outsource your core competency." AMD right now is a design house that hires out the actual fabbing of its processors. If it hires out design and fabbing, what is left for AMD to do that really adds value?

If AMD hires out the engineering on video cards, either they will end up spending more on quality engineering, in which case they didn't save any money (or their costs actually go up!); or they will spend less on middle-of-the-road engineering, in which case they won't be able to compete with nVidia.

Maybe, just maybe, the hot light of publicity before the planned round of layoffs will make AMD management think twice. If not, a few years from now, Qualcomm will be buying up AMD intellectual property at fire-sale prices when AMD goes under. (Or maybe Intel will buy it all and just shred it.)

AMD management made some bad decisions, then got rid of all the people who argued against those decisions. Now they are going to cut costs by firing the engineers who could develop new products. It is now inevitable: AMD is doomed.

"Unless the entire board and their puppets are removed in the next week or two, the little chance AMD has now will vanish. There is no up side here."

AMD's layoffs target engineering -- Board incompetence dooms the company

"AMD senior management, or (mis)management, as we are now calling them, have delayed the roadmap past the critical point. Project Win was survivable, barely. The churn of technical talent made things worse, far worse, and put the company at the breaking point. Layoffs sapped confidence, and senior management was negligent in not messaging a damn thing to those who mattered internally and externally. The cuts that will follow ensure that the plans in place are not achievable, and SemiAccurate can not see AMD surviving at this point."

AMD is imploding because management doesn't understand semiconductors -- Analysis: You can't Win by ignoring fundamentals

It would have taken you 10 whole seconds to google that and find out you are wrong. Yes, "rumble" feedback is patented

It sounds like your examples show that the basic idea of a rumble feedback isn't patented, but specific technology implementations are. I didn't mean to say that there were no patents on rumble mechanisms, only that there was no patent on the basic idea of rumbling. It doesn't sound like I am mistaken on this point.

I have no problem with Sony patenting a specific implementation; I have a problem if Sony has just succeeded in making a "land grab" and nobody else will be able to do thermal feedback in computer controllers.

The article says: "Though it doesn't mention any specific technology for heating or cooling on such a small scale, the patent does present a lot of ideas for how changing temperatures could be applied to video games." This sounds like a patent on the basic idea, not the patent on an implementation. Am I wrong here?

By the way, if Sony has some really clever way to heat and cool a controller without draining the battery quickly, that does sound to me like a technology that is worth patenting. But as I noted above, the article says the patent doesn't describe any particular way to do the heating and cooling.

No, a movie is not prior art, since it says nothing at all about HOW that effect is accomplished (which is, of course, what is patentable).

This sounds like you agree with me: the basic idea of a temperature feedback should not be patentable, but a technology to accomplish that feedback should be patentable.

Yes, "temperature feedback motion controller" is different from "battery level indicator". Why would you think otherwise?

Do you mean to say that Microsoft could make a new mouse, or joystick, or keyboard or something incorporating technology similar to what is described in the patent, and Sony wouldn't sue because the patent only covers a "motion controller"?

For that matter, if someone builds thermal feedback technology into a VR body suit, you think Sony won't sue them for infringing this patent?

The more limited the patent is, the less unhappy I will be about it. I thought Sony had just managed to patent the fundamental idea of a thermal feedback in a user interface. If they really have only managed to patent one specific way of doing it, and only in the domain of video game controllers, then never mind.

steveha

"The price of a thing is what the thing will bring." You can set a price anywhere you want, but it is up to the customers to decide whether they are willing to pay the price.

So, now, who wants a Surface? How does Surface fit in to the tablet market?

Apple made the first non-sucky tablet, and they reaped huge first-mover advantage, which is still paying off for them today. Related, they have network effect: everyone made apps for iPad because all the customers bought iPads, and customers bought iPads (in part) because of the rich selection of apps. Additionally, Apple did a great job on the user experience, and the quality is excellent. So you put all this together and Apple can command a premium price.

Along comes Android. Now you can get quite nice tablets for $200, and you can install any application you like. You can use multiple app stores if you like. So Android is both the low-cost solution and the more-free solution.

Along comes Microsoft. They are very, very late to the party. First mover advantage? Definitely not. Network effect, vast library of apps? No; they need to build a new stable of C# Windows 8 apps, from scratch. More-free? No; they are copying the Apple model, where the customer must go to the official app store. (And Microsoft is also copying the idea of raking a 30% commission on each sale. App developers tolerate this of Apple... will they tolerate it of Microsoft?)

So... low-cost? Definitely not. The Surface is being priced like an iPad. Customers are willing to pay a premium price for an iPad, but I cannot see any reason why customers would see enough value in a Surface to justify a premium price.

IMHO, Microsoft's best bet is to make the Surface integrate very smoothly into a Windows network. It should connect smoothly to Windows servers, it should have a good email client that can talk to Exchange servers, that sort of thing. That can carve out a niche in the business market, where incidentally a higher price doesn't hurt so much. But they are so late to the party, that many companies are already standardized on iPad. (And all the C-level executives want iPads and already have them.)

In short, at this price level, the Surface will be a niche product at best, and very possibly the next Zune.

steveha

I don't think anyone tried to patent the "rumble" feedback. Here's another feedback. Is this really patentable?

If so, I expect companies will rush out and file patents on making a controller emit audio to serve as a game feedback, making a controller flash LEDs to serve as a game feedback, making a controller give little electric shocks as a game feedback, etc. Basically just go down the list of possible stimuli and patent everything.

P.S. In the novel Bug Park, people tele-operate micro-robots by VR technology. The battery life of the remote micro-robot is signaled by means of a thermal plate touching the operator's skin: when the battery is full, the plate feels warm, and the plate cools as battery life drops. I'm not a lawyer, so maybe "in a video game" is different enough from "when tele-operating a micro-robot"... but IMHO, even if this patent passes the "obvious" test, it should flunk the prior art test.

steveha

Actually, now that I think about it, on that VTOL thing you stood on a platform directly over the engine. I guess the platform must have been offset high enough to allow sufficient air intake into the engine?

I'll just have to go back to the Evergreen Aviation Museum and look again, one of these days.

steveha

You can see a display about this in the Evergreen Avation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. They have an airplane on display with the "catcher" appratus mounted on the nose, and I think they have the other hardware too. (It's been a few years since I went there, and I mostly remember my tour of the Spruce Goose.)

http://www.evergreenmuseum.org/

They had some other intriguing stuff. I remember a short-range VTOL device that was basically an airplane engine mounted vertically; it sucked air in from the top, blew it out the bottom, and the operator would stand on a ring that circled the outside of the engine. I remember wondering how difficult that might be to fly, since it was too old to have a computer-controlled active stabilisation system. Also, I think I would want to wear hearing and eye protection if I was riding that thing.

steveha

You had to figure that Apple would release a new iPod, since they have obsoleted their old 30-pin connector. The new iPod models have the "Lightning" connector.

It also has an optional lanyard, which seems like a pretty good feature. That made me wonder "Why didn't they do that before?" For that matter, why don't any cell phones have an optional lanyard? I guess you can get a case with a lanyard if you really want one.

steveha

If you custom-build a board, and cost-engineer it so that it just has the components you actually need, you are spending a whole bunch of money up-front (mostly, the salaries of the engineers who do the custom board design). This will pay off if you ship a large volume. This up-front cost is called "NRE", for "non-recurring engineering costs"; the final cost of your product is NRE divided by the number of units you ship, plus the actual cost of the unit (parts and assembly).

If you know you are shipping exactly 1000 magazines with this gimmick inside, a custom board makes no sense; the NRE would totally wipe out the per-board savings. The cheapest option would be a stack of pre-built boards that someone has lying around, maybe from a phone that was current technology two years ago. It wouldn't surprise me if the ROM contains an off-the-shelf build of Android, just with one additional app installed and set always to run at boot-up. They could have built a custom ROM image of Android, for example with the phone app removed, but why bother? (And clearly the phone app was not in fact removed, as the Mashable folks used it to place a call.)

steveha

That doesn't make sense. Nexus costs, what, $200? Is he claiming that Windows OEM license for tablets costs $170?

Well, you could have tried reading the article. If you do read it, you will see that indeed he is claiming $170, but for a total cost, not just the OEM license for Windows 8 itself. Expanded quote from article:

Then there is the software costs. Microsoft threw Intel under a bus with WART [Windows on an ARM Tablet], if you buy the ARM version of Windows for about 2x the cost, you get Office for âfreeâ(TM). If you buy the x86 version of Windows 8, you get the OS for a little less than half the price, but without office. You then have to buy the full version of Office to put on it for $125 and up, way up if you want Outlook.
That puts any Clover Trail machine at $170 for the software alone before the bloated hardware costs to store and run everything.

I think he is assuming here that anyone who actually wants to buy a Windows 8 tablet will also want Office and probably Outlook. I think he's probably right on that point: I'm happy to run LibreOffice on Linux Mint, or use Google Docs on an Android tablet, but I'm not the target customer for a Windows 8 tablet.

It would be more fair to take out the cost of office when comparing the cost of the tablets. But the larger point is valid: Microsoft is trying for a premium product in a market where a $200 product is already established and popular.

steveha