I don't even think you made that up. But which is the 'other' article?

Whoa, whoa, whoa there. In actuality they got slightly drunk, exchanged a bunch of good jokes, couple - not so good ones, arrived at the destination, posed for couple of photos and got their PA's rattle off some politically correct stuff.

The only think what is unsure is why - surely they can afford the flight? Perhaps the whole idea was a brainchild of somebody looking for a knighting and this seemed like a good and reliable way to start associating him/her-self with 'multi-faceted visionaries that are providing insights on how to expand our reach into future'?

Sure, but don't forget that for residental connections there is quite large fixed component of latency in the last mile. IIRC circa 20ms for cable, 5-6ms for DSL and 2-3ms for radio (commercial uplink models, not modded wifi routers).

Would have been a great deal at launch, with all the implications of shipping in thousands and somebody perhaps maybe bothering with more software for it. Nowadays - not quite so.

Ecosystems have value. Their fate is often determined at launch.

Hey, at least they have got Internet Explorer!

We can only hope? That is a corporate PR exercise after all, whoever actually signs up is bound to be a tool.

Technically - microwave links have some of the lowest latency available. Much better than cable or DSL, on par with optical.

Seriously. Financial traders are using them as alternative to optical when they cannot get a straight enough fiber line.

Oh FFS - this isn't reddit!

Unless this NSA thing really starts to get out of hand. There's nothing to distract the sheeple like live 24 hours coverage of USA military might on Fox.

Who do you think will be the least untruthful?

Not to say that anything that comes out of the mouth of The Intelligence Committee (as they have publicly and repeatedly revealed that they are more than comfortable lying to the plebs of the public), this again focuses on the smear campaign, not the issues raised themselves.

What is fairly inarguable - government isn't really denying much (skirting around technicalities mostly), trying to argue that it's all kosher because secret court said so and doing their best to focus the attention on the messenger, not the message.

Now, I don't have problem with anyone spying on anyone, that's reality of the current world. What I do have fairly big problem is the cost of finding something to pin you down. As a simple example:

Imagine you are walking on the street, meet some lowly bureaucrat of the local town house and look at him 'all wrong'. Now, normally he would have to spend some time and effort if he felt pissed off and wanted to get you to a death row (well, or at least, suitably mess up your life). Look for probable cause, find some of your neighbours to agree that you are a menace to society and something should be done about you, all that kind of stuff.

Now he can just get back to the office, check in on your name, bring up, let's say, last 20 years of your communications, known associates, keyword tagged internet history and voila - you were in the same dorm in college as that very bad dude they found growing marijuana, you have been known to receive calls from somebody who has been receiving calls from somebody who has been to middle east and in October, 2018 you wrote on that Slashdot site that "all government officials are pigs and you would want to inflict physical harm to them in close and personal fashion". A SUSPECTED DOMESTIC TERRORIST ALERT!!!

(I hope I don't need to explain what happens when somebody writes a bash script to automate the example above or your chances of leading normal life when the FBI raids your home and workplace based on the probable cause provided above...)

You see, the problem is that none of the things 'revealed' are all that surprising. Security circles have been screaming at top of their lungs about this and much much worse (in example - with calls metadata collection, has it ever occurred to you that splicing a couple of fibres and collecting the raw feeds in transit just outside the operator network boundary is fairly trivial? It all has to travel over 'public' backbones these days. Metadata just helps to link the raw IP capture to a particular call afterwards), the challenge always has been to get the average Joe Blogs to understand why and why that might be a problem.

In short - average person can understand that somebody might be opening their mail in the post office (and are rightly pissed off and ready to fight). Computers are just damn too hard, so they tend to ignore or not understand the implications. Everything else is different levels of obfuscation by government and whistle-blowers.

I'm not sure how to parse this paragraph - you are saying that CATIA/Ansys are losing on AMD (unsure how that would be related to graphics pipeline used), yet you say that AMD is still favoured.

Assuming you can share some of your data, perhaps you can expand on where and by what margins you see specific advantages/disadvantages between Intel/AMD?

That is interesting. Are you in a position to go in more details?

(from my experience the game between amd and intel is a bit of a cat and mouse game. My previous system was AMD64x2 which was bounds and leaps above P4, since core2 came out AMD hasn't come even close to something that could match it on general performance/watt/price budget. Then again my primary machine is i5-760 which I find a plenty and my work stuff happens on top of the range xeons)

It is also significantly slower buck for buck in real life workloads.