Found on Urban Dictionary, subsequently removed for reasons unknown: belluzzo (n.) Someone who acts against the interests of the organization he’s with, often in favor of some other organization he may be secretly working for instead — a mole. Named after former SGI CEO Richard Belluzzo, who killed IRIX and MIPS at SGI in favor of NT on Itanium. Right before that, he was Executive VP at HP, where his main accomplishment was killing HPUX on PA-RISC in favor of NT on Itanium.
On average, computers last me for about 4 years. Last week, I was still using an 800MHz iMac. Partly this is down to my being frugal. It’s like the TV situation, where I didn’t buy the HDTV until my family visited and laughed at the 20″ TV, and seemingly made it die of shame shortly afterwards. Partly it’s because Macs remain usable longer than PCs. A PC Magazine survey found that Macs tend to last 3.
Here we are in 2006, and Intel still feels the need to engage in sexist advertising—on their home page, even. Yes, a Centrino Duo will make a hot babe suddenly appear and sit on your lap, boys. “I’d Core her Duo! Eh? Eh?” On a not unrelated note, Sony have a banner advert for Daxter running on Penny Arcade. At the end, a cartoon squirrel explains that it wants to hump the PSP.
That iPod Hi-Fi looks like it was stolen from the set of Space: 1999, doesn’t it? Come to think of it, a G5 would fit the decor of John Koenig’s desk perfectly. Perhaps the Apple iPhone will look like a commlock? Then there’s the Intel Mac Mini. We all knew that was coming. However, while the MacBook Pro comes with a Mobility Radeon X1600, the Mini comes with an Intel GMA950 integrated graphics chip.
I’ve been watching reaction to the Apple announcement. On the one side, there are a lot of long-time Mac fans who have been expressing a kind of unfocused pessimism. Something about the move makes them really unhappy at a subconscious level, but they seem unable to express exactly what. Then on the other hand, there are lots of people saying “Hey, it’s just a computer, it’ll still run OS X and be pretty and be a Mac even if it has a Pentium 4 inside.
It wasn’t much fun following Apple during the 90s. The transition from mono to color was painful, as it involved whole new chunks of OS and a different processor. The transition from Motorola 680×0 to PowerPC was also ugly and painful, and a lot of software simply stopped working and was never fixed. Those of us who had 680×0-based Macs quickly found them made forcibly obsolete long before they would normally have become unusable.
It’s something I’ve wanted to see happen for a couple of decades now, and finally it’s happening: Intel are getting their asses handed to them by a better CPU maker, in this case AMD. If you weren’t in the computer industry in the 80s, you might not be aware that IBM picked the x86 processor series for the IBM PC specifically because it sucked. IBM sold lots of high end workstations and word processing systems, and made good money doing so; the last thing it wanted was for the PC to eat into that market.
1. Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple Computer. C’mon, you knew I was going to pick Steve, didn’t you? It’s not that he doesn’t have his faults. He’s notoriously egotistical, can be breathtakingly rude, and allegedly cheated Woz on the payments for the design of Breakout. (Still, Woz seems to have forgiven him.) I’m not sure I’d want to work for Steve Jobs, and I’m still angry that he destroyed the Newton for no good reason, but it can’t be denied that he has turned Apple’s product designs from lackluster to stunning, and brought back a wonderful OS that may yet save the company in the long run.
Job losses over the last few weeks: Motorola: 4,000 jobs today, for a total of 22,000 since December. Lucent: 16,000. Verizon: 10,000. Nortel: 10,000. Compaq: 5,000. Intel: 5,000. Xerox: 4,000. Gateway: 3,000. Hewlett-Packard: 1,700. Dell: 1,700. Amazon: 1,300. 3com: 1,200. Oracle: 800 It’s also rumored that Sun are planning to ditch 10% of their employees, and Cisco are giving 5-10% of their staff unmatchable targets so they can force them to resign without calling it a layoff.