Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • Intel BK 2Q08!

    AMD needs some cash, so it’s taking out a $2b loan:

    The first quarter was a rough one for the chipmaker. AMD followed up its 2006 revenue and market share gains by posting a $600 million loss for the quarter. More alarmingly, it had only $1.2 billion in cash on hand, an amount that is just twice the company’s minimal acceptable level.

    An ongoing price war with Intel is hurting AMD in the short term, and its first quarter results demonstrate how deeply the price cuts affected its bottom line. Unfortunately for AMD and its investors, it looks like things won’t change much in the short term. Two weeks ago, the company announced more price cuts in an attempt to fend off the Core 2 Duo.

    The Ars article notes that AMD is hardly out of the game. They have some impressive products in the pipeline, including quad-core cpus (“Barcelona”) and new GPU technology derived from its purchase of ATI. And it’s absolutely better for the consumer to have AMD be a healthy competitor to Intel than a weak foe; the astounding innovations of the Core Duo platform (derived from Intel’s Israel-based design team) are arguably solely the result of competitive pressure. I for one hope that AMD’s gamble pays off and they can hold it together long enough to deliver solid computing options for both the average consumer and enthusiast.

    Couldn’t resist a little dig at Sharikou with the post title, though. June 2007 is when Intel will supposedly be “obsolete” – so let’s see.

    UPDATE: Ouch. Worth keeping in mind that market share is intrinsically volatile, whereas prices tend to go in one direction: down.

  • Happy birthday to the Bard

    It seems worth mentioning that today is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare. From this morning’s Writer’s Almanac:

    His early popularity made him a lot of enemies. The very first person ever to write about Shakespeare was the poet Robert Greene, who accused Shakespeare of plagiarism, calling him, “An upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.” And in fact most of Shakespeare’s plays were not original, but based on historical events or old stories. What made them great was his extraordinary ability with language. He used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words.

    Happy birthday, you old ghost.

  • Earth Day

    I try very hard to keep my politics out of this blog – and I largely succeed. Unfortunately, in today’s Clausewizian political environment, it’s hard to demonstrate genuine respect for Earth Day without being immediately classified into tiny, neat little ideological boxes. Therefore, I choose to honor Earth Day here in my apolitical blogspace by honoring Richard Nixon, who founded the Environmental Protection Agency by signing the Environmental Policy Act of 1969, remarking:

    What we really confront here is that in the highly industrialized, richest countries, we have the greatest danger. Because of our wealth we can afford the automobiles, we can afford all the things that pollute the air, pollute the water, and make this really a poisonous world in which to live.

    And, quoting Theodore Roosevelt:

    “It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.”

    And that’s all I have to say about that.

  • Quantum reality is better than reality

    Ars Technica summarizes a new article in Nature that suggests that reality is overrated. In a nutshell, any concept of “local realism” is trumped by quantum mechanics. The article abstract reads:

    Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of ‘realism’—a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. But quantum physics has shattered some of our cornerstone beliefs. According to Bell’s theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like separated regions) is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Experiments with entangled pairs of particles have amply confirmed these quantum predictions, thus rendering local realistic theories untenable. Maintaining realism as a fundamental concept would therefore necessitate the introduction of ‘spooky’ actions that defy locality. Here we show by both theory and experiment that a broad and rather reasonable class of such non-local realistic theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations. In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned.

    Thankfully, we remain macroscopic entities. Though hardly unentangled.

  • The road goes ever on

    No, I’m not about to break into Hobbit song; via Don, the new Kino’s Journey movie (The Beautiful World: Byouki no Kuni – For You) is set to be released this Saturday in Japan. I assume that fansubs and then a dubbed English version will follow soon. It’s nice to actually have something to look forward to; along with The Girl who Leapt Through Time I actually have items of substance on my To Watch list.

  • Wii? Non.

    Yes, I’ve run out of English-language Nintendo Wii puns and am now reaching into French. But the fact remains that it is now March and the Wii is still incredibly hard to find. The shortage has attracted the attention of Real Economists now. Some of the more interesting consequences:

    • There are no known parts shortages, but Nintendo simply can’t keep up with demand. I remember reading earlier that Nintendo decided to use sea-based shipments to save money rather than air shipments from the manufacturer to market; that surely adds another bottleneck to exacerbate the manufacturing one.
    • Retailers and Nintendo’s competitors actually benefit from the shortages, because walk-ins searching for a Wii end up buying something else.
    • Nintendo is hurt by this, since the units are being scalped for up to double retail pricve, and not a penny of that goes into Nintendo’s pockets. Likewise, game vendors are being hurt because they are sitting on a lot of Wii game titles that people can’t play, so their inventory isn’t moving.

    So the bottom line is a weird kind of limbo where Wii unit sales still top the sales of any other new console by a huge margin, since every Wii that makes it to the shelves is snapped up immediately. However, sales of old-generation Playstation 2 have been boosted by the shortage, beating out the Wii’s numbers, because the PS2 is the only thing in a comparable price range that can appeal to the disappointed walk-in. But the true king of the hill is the Nintendo DS which blows every other game system old or new, console or handheld, out of the water. Here are the numbers:

    Sales of the new video game systems cooled slightly, according to sales numbers released by NPD for the month of March. Sales of Nintendo DS nearly doubled that of anything else, selling over a half-million units.
    […]
    The PlayStation 2 demonstrated impressive staying power at second place at 280,000 sold, outselling each of the new consoles. Wii came out on top of the new consoles once again with 259,000 units, well ahead of the Xbox 360 at 199,000. The PlayStation 3 lagged behind both the PSP and the Game Boy Advance at 130,000 units sold.

    What to conclude? In a nutshell, people want innovative and accessible games for cheap. The PS3 is innovative but not cheap; the XBox is not that innovative, just evolutionary, and still pricey. The Wii has both at a low price point, and the DS is cheaper still – and judging from the blowout of the DS over the PS2, price matters more than innovation.

    I think this kind of sounds the death knell of the old gamer marketing model. The elite gamers who can dish out $600 for the latest console just can’t carry the market anymore. Those consoles actually lose money on every sale, in fact! Expect to see the PS$ and the next iteration of the XBox to reverse course and offer only marginal hardware improvements, and a new “shtick” aimed at capturing away some of the enormous, heretofore unsuspected family gaming market. That’s where the profits and the market share lie. The hard core types still have the PC market, after all. The rest of us are willing to wait two years for a $250 PS3.

  • Welcome

    12:39pm yesterday. 5lbs, 5 oz, 18 inches. Baby and mother are doing wonderfully, though exhausted.

    sspx0303.jpgsspx0305.jpg

    I am so toast.

  • The Drinky Crow Show

    Brian points to a new cartoon, The Drinky Crow Show, being animated for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. While I have zero interest in the show, it is worthy of mention that They Might be Giants is doing the theme song for the opener. In honor of this, here’s the music video for My Experimental Film.

  • chocolate kiss

    Via Slashfood, an excellent use of university resources:

    When it comes to tongues, melting chocolate is better than a passionate kiss, scientists have found.

    […]

    Dr Lewis said: “There is no doubt that chocolate beats kissing hands down when it comes to providing a long-lasting body and brain buzz.

    “A buzz that, in many cases, lasted four times as long as the most passionate kiss.”

    He said substances in chocolate were already known to have a psychoactive effect, but that allowing it to melt on your tongue could be the secret to maximising the buzz.

    The volunteers, all aged in their 20s, had electrodes attached to their scalps and wore heart monitors during the two tests.

    The researchers compared their resting heart rates with those during the chocolate and kissing tests.

    Speaking as a scientist myself, I have to confess that my research is pretty dull in comparison.

    In other highly relevant and correlated news, IT workers will gladly surrender their system passwords for chocolate and a smile.

  • Zamba.

    Zamba (Kip Rood)

    What the heck am I talking about? Click to enlarge.

    originally published in the Daily Cardinal by Kip Rood, circa 1992.