9-28-13 Hodgepodge

Is Intel Slowly Killing off the PC?

The pursuit of Shiny New regardless of the desires of one's customer base sounds like it will do the trick:

In response to these painfully obvious problems, what does Intel do? They actually mandated Windows 8/8.1 to get kickbacks, mandated touch screens, mandated a paid anti-virus for said insecure OS, and jacked the prices way up with Haswell. What do users get in return? Slightly better performance, slightly better battery life, and a step up in graphics performance. Notice how many of the solutions Intel mandates are listed as problems by users? Notice how many of the things users didn't want were in fact moved to the mandatory column from optional? See any problems?

I wonder what part of "If I wanted an iPad, I wold have bought an iPad," Intel doesn't get. Just because one segment of a market is growing doesn't mean that there is nothing to be made in another.

Weekend Reading

"Confusion is a signal from your mind that you're wishing for two things that don't go together." -- Michael Hurd, in "Anxiety Liberation" at The Delaware Coast Press

"Give your kids the reasons why they should act a certain way." -- Michael Hurd, in "10 Tips for Well-Adjusted Kids" at The Delaware Wave

"It is impossible to overstate how different Madoff's motives were from those of genuinely successful businessmen, who thrive and prosper over the long run through their productive exploits" -- Don Watkins, in "Bernie Madoff, Steve Jobs, and Wall Street Greed" at The American Magazine

"Paying cash can also protect your medical privacy in the era of electronic medical records." -- Paul Hsieh, in "How Patients Can Protect Themselves Against Big Medicine" at PJ Media

My Two Cents

The teaser quote for the Hsieh article was something I was unaware of.

I suspect that almost anyone would do well to read this piece for specific ways of protecting himself from the progressively slipshod (and expensive) medical care ObamaCare threatens to bring.

Collateral Sensitivity

Via Instapundit, possibly good news on the antibiotic resistance front:

In the new research, systems biologists Lejla Imamovic and Morten Sommer of the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby used Escherichia coli to explore how bacteria change when they become resistant to a drug. They found that when E. coli gains resistance to one antibiotic, it also becomes more sensitive others--a phenomenon they call "collateral sensitivity."

The new research suggests that careful cycling between drug types could wipe out resistant bacteria in patients.

--CAV