- AMD was on top of the world with Opteron / AMD64
- Intel was losing everywhere it went. You'd be hard-pressed to find an Internet / financial shop *not* buying AMD
- But Intel responded with Merom / Core2Duo. That mostly closed the gap, though initially the memory subsystem was still inferior
- Had AMD met expectations with the follow-on part (Bulldozer), there is no reason they could not have continued to win
- But in my mind, their ATi acquisition initiated their downfall. They became schizophrenic.

To beat Intel (like most market leaders) you have to have a non-trivial advantage. When AMD had one, they kicked Intel's ass to the point that they severely altered Intel's roadmap. When they no longer had one, they lost.

Last time I looked at buying SF property potentially to rent out I was scared off by the regulations the city imposes on landlords. How can anyone sleep at night knowing your tenants are more in control than you are? I'm going to bet I'm not the only one with this impression, which would mean given a choice individual owners will sell long before they'll risk getting into the 'affordable rent' game. Same dynamic may be why the developments are condos, not rentals.

So why no mention of the city's propensity to make being a landlord miserable?

For web applications, you're dreaming if you think MS is the most widely used platform.

Your post summarizes beautifully the fatal flaw with MS tools and Market-tectures.

They work great if you go down MS's beaten path.

They leave you in a lurch if you need to go off the path.

All along, Microsoft will trumpet the technology as the answer to everything and cause countless developers pain as they follow the same unreliable path only to fnid they can't ship anything interesting. It was a big eye-opener to me the day I realized that Microsoft told everyone to use MFC but shipped no MFC-based apps themselves.

Got to admit, though, that C# is pretty nice as a language.

I'm sure there are some brilliant nurses. I'm sure nurses are responsible for countless saved lives. I'm sure doctors could learn a lot if they spent time doing nursing. I'm sure that some nurses know more about practical human health mechanisms than some doctors do. But I have never heard of a doctor that got his M.D., then did nursing, then became a doctor.

I ride a bike 4-5x a week to work. My car often goes weeks - maybe a month - between drives. And I encourage everyone to do the same if they can.

But not because of CO2. CO2 is a trace gas comprising only .04% of the atmosphere. Humans emit only a small portion of the world's CO2, but it seems we must believe that the Earth can absorb and produce finite, unchanging amounts of CO2 such that any perturbation is disastrous. The climate data is not consistent, nor is the science predictive. Yes, pollution - as in things that dirty other things - is abhorrent. Yes, saving energy and money is great and we all need more exercise. But the CO2 obsession is a cult that insists everyone join.

...that the creator of C++ runs Windows. C++ is a barely-stomach-able OO implementation, and Windows is a barely-usable GUI & OS. I look forward to using neither, but often must do so.

A calculator without RPN is like a computer that only runs Windows.

Microsoft's problem is with software more than hardware. The Windows phones may not have been as slick as an iPhone, but the hardware sufficed in terms of durability, phone quality and screen. What did not suffice was/is the software, and I believe that is why Apple walked away with the smart phone market despite Microsoft's much earlier presence. Microsoft has existed in an environment for 30+ years in which poor or barely-passable software could lead to tremendous success. Those days are THANKFULLY over. Do they realize this? Or, just as Ringo Star claimed to be the world's best drummer (by association to the worlds most prevalent band) do Microsoft managers walk around confidently trumpeting that Windows is the greatest OS in the world?

The day that I can buy a non-Mac laptop that has a slick, polished, Unix-ish OS in a quiet, pleasing metal form factor is the day I even think about caring about cheaper.

Please do not use the word 'baddies'.

My job is to code. I had a neighbor that worked in a paint factory. He got hurt, and went to school to learn software. Pretty soon, he's coming home talking to me about UML / Booch and other esoteric OOP topics that I barely had a grasp of. I thought, gee, wow, it is amazing to see how fast a blue collar guy can come up to speed. But then it all kind of fizzled out. And I wondered for a long time why that was. How could someone get so far and be able to recite complex comp-sci topics and then give up?

And the answer is, there are (at least) 2 components to being a s/w developer. You need to be able to think and analyze and understand. But you also need to be able to - and more importantly - slog it out to make it work. And it's that slogging out that - at least in my experience - is where you truly grok the information and become effective and confident and useful.

So, that's why I say 'beware'. You might be having one of those 'I know Kung Fu' moments, because you can understand your textbook. And that is a wonderful thing. But unless you cement that knowledge by actually using it - and in particular, by learning to debug hairy problems - it is at risk of floating away.

I mean, I could pick up a cutting edge cardiology book and, given a few weeks, recite and even talk intelligently about topics that most doctors wouldn't know. I could probably impress virtually all of the population with this knowledge. But, I would be a long way from being someone anyone would hire to cut someone open. Balance your book knowledge with practical knowledge. You need a residency.

I'm certain that asthma medication elevates the heart rate - especially Albuterol.