ikono

The primary cost of a SoC is manufacturing. Process advantages mean that you have access to cheaper transistors that have better performance and power characteristics. The easiest way to improve the ratio of performance to anything in microprocessors has always been to make it smaller. There have been far too many words wasted on the role of instruction sets and architectures. Those things matter but that's the easy part. The hard part is getting a meaningful advantage in the manufacturing side, which is what Intel has. This is precisely why AMD is dying. They can't even undercut Intel because Global Foundries is so far behind Intel that they physically can't produce an equivalent product for less despite Intel's ~60% margins.

I think what you will see is Intel getting more aggressive in the mobile space in the next couple years because they are going to want to ensure that TSMC doesn't get a chance to catchup. TSMC is the real key to anyone threatening Intel not ARM.

So generally I'll try to do one of two things:

1) Find a partner. I find it a lot easier to get going and a lot harder to quit when there's someone else going through it with you; sort of like going to the gym...

2) Pick an idea that still excites me even after sitting in my list for a while. If I'm going to go it alone, whatever it is has to be important enough to me that I still care after that initial honeymoon. This time is really valuable to me personally. I find that in the beginning I focus on potential but given some time I'll eventually come back to earth and think more about what needs to be done, all the steps, and potential roadblocks. After all that, if I'm still excited to tackle the problem, I have at least some confidence that I'll have the conviction to push through the hard times.

Fair warning, my current list is long and the number completed is still zero (abandoned projects is also zero). I have just started working on something recently though, so there is some hope. I guess this is really a long winded way of saying try to find something that you're really passionate about, don't waste time on things you aren't, and don't get discouraged if you haven't found it yet.

There is a difference between saying that the government should invest in and fund all companies and saying that there are cases where the free market will not act in the national best interest on it's own and the government can. The underlying issue here is that oil is subsidized in the US. It's not just the tax benefits to oil companies, it's all the military spending required to maintain undisrupted oil flow from the most unstable regions in the world. We've gotten to the point where we can't just stop cold turkey; so you've got to invest some money to clean up a mess made in the past. I'd love to get to the point where all our energy choices were on a level playing field so the free market could do the work but that just doesn't seem plausible today.

It's cliche at this point, but the space program and DARPA/ARPA investments led to a lot of the technology that enabled the formation and/or success of companies like Apple and Google.

This is off topic but with regard to your some of your other points, it's completely true that the federal government doesn't have to treat it's debt the same way a household does. That doesn't mean it should spend as much as it wants, but it does mean that it can spend a little more than it brings in forever. By senior equity I meant that the government's claims to profits(taxes) are senior to other equity holders.

Your points regarding state-owned companies is more a case against equity investment and a defense of the loan model. The US government isn't going to go to extreme measures to recoup a billion dollars and because it doesn't have any additional equity there's no other real incentive to prop up the companies that it has loaned money to. The free market is an extremely powerful system that is capable of remarkable things but it's not perfect and there are problems that the free market won't address on it's own (climate change being a poster boy example).

Nothing can replace good parents but there's only so much that can be done to improve the general quality of parents. Given that society has a vested interest in the future of every child, I don't think it's unreasonable for government to try to do better. That doesn't necessarily mean the public school system; it could be vouchers, various incentives, etc. But just saying parents need to do it is a cop out, shortsighted, and unrealistic.

In terms of what's wrong and suggestions for improvement, it's hard to know where to start. One big, doable change may just be more standardized testing. The price of education is simply a reflection of the fact that employers and students overvalue degrees. This leads to this perverse effect that causes people to enroll because they feel like they have to, not because they want to. The whole dynamic just seems to create an enormous amount of problems. Tying so much economic value to a college degree drives prices and attendance up and the effectiveness and true value of education down.

I would actually make a different argument though. As time goes on the absolute cost of the CPU is not that important. For big data centers lowering costs is about efficiency more than cheaper hardware. So in my mind a lot of what Intel is trying to do on the Mobile side, both laptop and smartphone/tablet, will help them in the data center. If Intel can drive down both peak and idle power consumption while maintaining or even improving both single threaded and multi threaded performance, there's potential to really lower the power needed to run a data center and in turn create a lot of value.

The real question is what's the next big thing going to be? Eventually the current CPU model will give out to something else. Maybe that's something like Psi or Tesla or maybe something completely different.

The question is are people investing in these companies or are they speculating about them?

I've said this before but anytime a stock is trading at an earnings multiple significantly higher or lower than average, the burdon of proof should fall on the person arguing for such a multiple.

Netflix is trading at a P/E of about 75. Right or wrong that should at least give an investor pause. There is a lot of success already baked into that price. At this type of multiple a company has to outperform already sky high expectations in order for an investor to make money(in a fully rational world). This is possible but it becomes increasingly difficult as that multiple expands.

You can see them steadily selling off shares here: http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/own-disp?action=getissuer&CIK...

And while I'm sympathetic to the notion that anyone would be better than Ballmer, it really is hard to find a good CEO.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-che...

The problem with this is some apps already use those gestures for other things.