We had the graveyard when I was junior programmer on the Univac. It got really exciting one night! They had a Halon gas fire system. The access to the room was via a narrow, short corridor that could accommodate only two people at a time, and only one door could be open at a time. Usually, there were only 6-8 people in the room. This night, there were 14 as we had tech’s from Sperry working out an upgrade & maintenance program. The fire alarm sounded, and we froze. We’d had drills and knew only 10 could get out before the gas vented. We were on the 2nd floor. Two of us grabbed the big & heavy line printer and hurled it through the window! (I was weightlifting at the time & the strongest there). Turned out, it was (an expensive) false alarm. LOL *shrug*

we (operaters) wouldn’t even load that partition until after 8PM at the earliest

we (long-suffering students) found that we could get our jobs run fastest if we took our cards in to the computer center after 2am. 😛

People hung on to Win98, so they didn’t need extra speed, and then the hardware seem to still be usable, so to save money money many businesses changed to ‘change when broken’ rather than a schedule. This led to the extended life of Win98, and especially WinXP.

Obviously the Great Recession didn’t do anything good. for any sector of the economy.

The companies that still have a regular replacement cycle are at 5 years now. Many businesses will have fixed systems at offices, a significant number are shifting to the laptop or laptop/dock model rather than a box for most workers in sales and marketing, but the data entry and accounting departments will still want a box with a good keyboard and decent screen. The graphics people need big displays and alternative input devices.

I have an two towers, two laptops, and the iPad. I would have a Smartphone if the phone companies would stop ripping people off. The initial cost is high, but the monthly cost is what keeps me out of the market.

At the end of the day I dump everything into the big box, and then back it up. That, together with some thumbdrives is my version of the ‘Cloud’ that is available to me anywhere.

Another thing that Intel and others might want to consider is that they can’t outsource all of their good-paying jobs to low wage countries and expect to have many people left to buy expensive products.

I have a desktop computer here at home, running Windows 10. But it’s strictly for games. Everything else is done with my Macbook Pro, currently hooked to a 32″ 1440p monitor and Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to bring you this tome :).

I didn’t always agree with Steve Jobs. But he had a talent for spotting where the industry was going — or needed to go — and steering his company there. Apple has really been in a holding pattern since his death, just endlessly iterating on things Steve did, rather than looking ahead. That’s not a recipe for long-term success, as Intel is finding out as pushing forward Andy Grove’s strategy over and over again worked for many years, but has decidedly hit its limits now.

As for AMD, they’re basically out of the CPU business now except as a chip design and licensing firm akin to ARM. They’ve licensed all their CPU designs to a consortium of Chinese chip firms who are going to be doing all the manufacturing of the next-gen AMD processors. Real men have fabs, but when fabs cost $5B and up, what can you do? Other than license your designs to people who *do* have fabs?

The DELL Venue 11 Pro 7140 tablet! LOL I love it, really. 🙂 I have it hooked up to my BenQ GW2255HM display (via it’s micro-HDMI port) that I got for a steal price of $129. 🙂 I have a 7-port USB 3.0 hub hooked to it’s single USB 3.0 port, with my old Tesoro Gungnir H5 mouse and the Ducky Zero mech KB, and a bunch of external HDD’s. The Gigabyte Aivia M8600 v2 mouse & the big Aivia Osmium KB are on the *build from hell*. 😀

When i go out, I take it with me, but with a small Bluetooth KB with a trackpad. I prefer it to the touchscreen which get’s hard to read after 10 min’s! I have to constantly clean it, same with the damned phone! *sigh*

I think Intel underestimated how quickly the reliance on big systems would slow. It hasn’t gone, and like you, I doubt it will. 🙂 But it isn’t what it was 10 years ago. One thing I have to give Jobs credit for, he saw it coming! And rather than wait for the shoe to drop, he became a cobbler and drove it even faster! LOL In the mid-2k’s, we had memos that the manufacture of notebooks & server systems would increase, but desktops would decrease. The focus shifted to backend systems & portability. The G5 was the last of the *big* desktop’s for Apple. Jobs was working with Intel at the time making the move from IBM/Motorola who just couldn’t compete (in terms of compute power & power requirements)! But Intel stubbornly refused to see it. *shrug*

Intel’s new Broadwell-E line I think will find a shrinking market. The high-end 10-core CPU might find a home in high-end design systems, and the loyal fan boys will buy them for their gaming rigs, for little real advantage. 🙂 I think they will have more success with the Kaby Lake-U and Kaby Lake-S chips, and maybe the Apollo Lake SoC’s. Only time will tell. 🙂

Intel announced in March, in a Form 10-K report, that it had deprecated their usual “Tick-Tock” cycle in favor of a three-step “process-architecture-optimization” model. Under this *new* model, three generations of processors will be produced with a single manufacturing process, adding an extra phase for each with a focus on optimization. Intel already broke the cycle by delaying the 10 nm Cannonlake to 2017, and planning a third generation of processors using 14 nm, the Kaby Lake.

I think AMD saw it also. They knew they couldn’t really compete on the desktop any longer, and decided to focus on server & portable technology. And maybe, they will be the winner. I don’t know. 🙂

The thing about devices is that the technology is moving so fast there, a three year old device is obsolete and new software won’t even install on it because it doesn’t have the latest Android or iOS on it. But eventually that curve will flatten out too.

What’s happening is that Intel geared up for continuous growth, and now they’re in a new era of no growth, where people buy new equipment only when the old equipment wears out, not because the old equipment is no longer capable of running the latest operating systems and software. But the death of the PC isn’t happening. Just isn’t. Because sometimes you need a screen bigger than a postage stamp and an actual keyboard to get shit done. That’s why my managers gave up trying to do their work on iPads and now have Microsoft Surface II “fat” tablets, they hook’em up to real keyboards and monitors when they get to the office, because when you’re trying to design a presentation or view a spreadsheet, a tiny postage stamp display is the *last* thing you want to be staring at…

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup

HYPER VISION – The world’s hottest startup isn’t located in Silicon Valley—it’s in suburban Florida. KEVIN KELLY explores what Magic Leap’s mind-bending technology tells us about the future of virtual reality.

THERE IS SOMETHING special happening in a generic office park in an uninspiring suburb near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Inside, amid the low gray cubicles, clustered desks, and empty swivel chairs, an impossible 8-inch robot drone from an alien planet hovers chest-high in front of a row of potted plants. It is steampunk-cute, minutely detailed. I can walk around it and examine it from any angle. I can squat to look at its ornate underside. Bending closer, I bring my face to within inches of it to inspect its tiny pipes and protruding armatures. I can see polishing swirls where the metallic surface was “milled.” When I raise a hand, it approaches and extends a glowing appendage to touch my fingertip. I reach out and move it around. I step back across the room to view it from afar. All the while it hums and slowly rotates above a desk. It looks as real as the lamps and computer monitors around it. It’s not. I’m seeing all this through a synthetic-reality headset. Intellectually, I know this drone is an elaborate simulation, but as far as my eyes are concerned it’s really there, in that ordinary office. It is a virtual object, but there is no evidence of pixels or digital artifacts in its three-dimensional fullness.
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