Intel speeds up road map to tackle threat from ARM

is the title of an article by ComputerWorld that talks about Intel’s decision to move off of center from desktop and server processors to mobile processing.

My thoughts? Without having seen the numbers put together by Intel I say it could be a poor strategic decision. The mobile ship has basically sailed. My view on this comes with a set of assumptions. They are:
1. That wireless communication speeds are likely to continue to increase.
2. That computationally intensive tasks will increasingly be offloaded to the “cloud” as many like to call it.
3. That processing power is near enough to being sufficient for all necessary application that a mobile platform
may want to run.

Given my assumptions it’s not hard to see why I say that this could be a poor long term decision for Intel. The market is near a point where mobile devices will no longer benefit marginally from additional speed increases. So what is it that Intel has to offer the market that’s not already present? Definitely their new “3D” process should benefit the market in terms of energy consumption, but they just as easily could render profit from this technology through licensing and royalties instead of allocating so many resources to a new division where they definitely lack market share.

It is understandable that Intel would want to shift out of consumer processing. This is a market with a limited shelf life in terms of sustainability. Fewer and fewer people will need PCs with the emergence of devices that fulfill their needs that were previously only met by desktop machines. The server market will remain strong for some time but they know that as well. I think however that they’re moving in the wrong direction for profitability. That’s just me, and I have nowhere near the quality of metrics Intel is likely to have when making these decisions.

Time will tell the truth. She never lies.

It’s been some time since I’ve posted. Well, maybe more close to a lot of time since I’ve last posted. Despite my absence I felt compelled to share an experience today. I had to RMA a Western Digital Caviar 500GB drive today. One of the AAKS models which apparently is having some issues. I just wanted to say the process was 1) simple and 2) quick. I opted for the advanced replacement option whereby WDC shipped me a new drive and I returned my defective one.

On a side note I was pleased to see the package that the drive came in labeled as thus: “For a better environment, this container was not bleached white. All packing materials were manufactured without the use of CFC’s or HCFC’s.” Granted I’m not an expert in how package manufacturing is accomplished I applaud the effort by WDC to make sure it is known that they are attempting to be environmentally friendly. Every little bit counts.

I have become of the opinion that Sun Microsystems is an AWESOME company with AWESOME products. So what’s the problem? CONVOLUTION!

They have a ton of technologies, a ton of software, and a ton of great products with a ton of really creative names. This gets confusing! Making your way through their marketing talk up on each of their products/technologies and actually figuring out what they are, what they do, and how they work is a chore to say the least. I am of the belief that they are limiting their customer base because of this.

Quick example. A few weeks ago I finally decided to look into GlassFish. Sure there’s plenty of information for people who are already very familiar with Sun offerings and Java. However I am a PHP/MySQL kind of guy. I haven’t programmed in Java since my sophomore year of college! I want to know how to use GlassFish to help me achieve my goals without reading through 100 pages of white papers and sifting through marketing balony. Eventually I got the gist of it but I was very dedicated to sifting through the information and reading documentation. Most developers in my position would have said, “Screw it. I’ll stay with what I have.”, several days ago.

The same can be said for many of Sun’s products. Which is a tragedy because after reviewing a lot of their products I can see that they have a ton to offer the IT world.

Wake up SUN! Show the world what you have!

Well I was reviewing the table partitioning feature in the now GA MySQL 5.1 and to my dismay you may neither have a foreign key in a partitioned table nor can you have a foreign key in another table that refers to a key in a partitioned table. How lame is that! Good lord! One of the essential features of a relational database is that it be RELATIONAL. So now we’re left out in the cold if we want MySQL to enforce referential integrity with it’s existing provisions and use table partitioning at the same time.

I have already ran a scenario in my head to work around this problem. It’s should be as simple as setting up triggers to enforce database relations that should be either added, removed, or denied based on the relationship. Definitely NOT the preferred way to do this but another way to accomplish the same, without handling it in the application logic, escapes me at the moment.