he didn't say that the earthquake was caused by a pact with the devil explicitly.

he did say that he believes the nation is suffering because they made a pact with the devil.

more importantly, in that interview in which the discussion was haiti he spent most of the time talking with the pact with the devil and no time at all talking about the natural disaster. he clearly thinks this pact is very important, and more relevant to what is happenning in that country right now than the earthquake itself.

that fact alone, in my mind, is proof positive that mr. robertson is a closed minded fool. if he possessed the ability to see beyond his narrow world view he would realize that a time like this is NOT the time to be pointing fingers and making accusations, however indirect they may be.

while I agree that the school completely over reacted, there was no science fair involved. this was a science project the kid was working on at home that he brought to school just to show his classmates. the article makes no mention of it being a class project or part of any science fair.

to add to my own comment. this problem with manufacturing costs is surely the reason AMD has spun off their fabs into a separate company. It will be interesting to see if they can be more successful now that they do not have to directly maintain their own fabs.

Back in the Athlon days, AMD lacked the manufacturing capacity to control 50% of the market. If all their fabs were running at 100% at that time, and every chip they made was being sold, the total number of chips sold wouldn't have been anywhere near 50% of the market. Intel doesn't actually have to do anything illegal or sleezy to stay ahead on market share. The fact is that no matter how bad their chips might suck the big manufacturers like Dell et. al. will still have to use Intel chips in the majority of the machines they sell because AMD isn't physically capable of making enough. That is the fine line AMD has to tread. They have to constantly stay ahead in performance while slowly growing their market share and then use the profits to invest in increased manufacturing capacity. It takes years to build a new plant afterall, and if you build too many too quickly, you'll end up with manufacturing capacity you cannot use and you lose tons of money because maintaining a microprocessor manufacturing plant is enormously expensive.

It's about programmers lacking basic knowledge (or at least failing to take account) of how a computer works internally. well written and well validated software doesn't have problems like this.

You need to keep in mind the reason that CPUs are not designed the way that GPUs are designed. GPUs are very good at easily parallelizable repetitive computations. GPU performance grinds to a snails pace as soon as you have to take a branch.

Unless you are writing the kind of code in which if statements are nearly non-existent, you are not likely to find programming for a GPU-style pipeline to be very palatable.

You do need to keep in mind one of the primary reasons CPUs are designed the way that GPUs are designed. GPUs are very good at doing massively parallel repetitive computations like what you need to do when processing an image for a display or like some small segments of the HPC market regularly do. But GPU performance grinds to a halt as soon as your code needs to take a branch.

Unless you write the kind of code in which if statements are nearly non-existent, you are likely to find programming for a GPU-style architecture to be unhelpful.

agreed. which suggests the companies problem, if there really is one, is that they are not buying the machines that best fit the needs of their software stack.

You are probably right. It'd be nice if he could say what precisely he thinks they are lying about. I mean, I know marketing is always exaggerated to some degree, but as rule, it seems to me that AMD and Intel processors do generally perform the way the companies claim they will if you look past the hype at the technical details.

lenovo is really just trying to motivate me to stop being lazy and finally uninstall all the software they pre-installed on the laptop I purchased earlier this year. ;)

I'm bemused that he implies the problems with his servers are due to Intel and AMD no delivering with their chips, yet at the same time he admires google for how good a job they do in building out their machines.

he must be aware that google uses Intel and AMD chips.

his reasoning just doesn't square.

while it is true that "beaming" broadband into Iran is absurd. as others have said, whomever asked the press secretary that question is ignorant of how broadband works and deserves to be laughed at soundly by their peers. :p

that said, your characterization of Iran is way off. Iran is considerably more civilized then what you think it is. Electricity, cell phones, computers, and internet access are all relatively common place in Iran.

The place that you are describing is called Afghanistan.

The user's perception of the performance differences between older CPUs running Win95 and newer CPUs running modern OS's has nothing to do with the processors that AMD and Intel are selling. It is the software. it is partly the operating system. it's partly the fact that people run a lot more junk in the background then they used to.

it is also sometimes the OEM's fault unfortunately.

amusing antectode: a friend of mine was recently having serious performance problems with his new laptop. I spent half a day trying to figure out why and discovered that the OEM had installed a "power saving" application on the machine that was performing registry reads 20-100 times per second. The only thing the application had in the registry was its configuration settings. Needless to say, the OEM, who shall go unnamed clearly has an utterly incompetent software engineering team. The application was suppossed to detect when to throttle down the CPU frequency and thereby save battery life, but the application was drawing more power all by itself then anything else in the system and was causing performance on this otherwise excellent piece of hardware be horrible.

In that case, I uninstalled all OEM supplied software from the system and it became quite snappy.