Don,
Do you think their parents might read an occassional business related magazine?
The coverage of Rambus and RDRAM in business magazines has been incredibly spotty and minimal, at least as far as controversies go. If you compare the number of articles published on the Firestone tires in newspapers, magazines, news shows, etc., etc., etc., the Rambus story is a complete non-issue. (and, p.s., one of the things that scares me about this country is that I'm not sure that most people do read a business related magazine occassionally <G>. Not when the average person reads something like 1.3 books per year. I wonder how the readership of People magazine compares to Forbes? <VBG>).
In the past, we've discussed whether anyone really knows what memory is in their system, and I still believe that people are buying the system primarily based on price/performance trade-offs (that is, if they want a high performance system right now, they'll probably buy a P4 [based on marketing campaigns] regardless of the memory it has [under the assumption that whatever it has will work]). It's the system, not the parts. Case in point, just this past Tuesday, a friend who has worked in high-tech companies here in the valley for at least 15 years, was confused by information he was getting from Dell. The Tech Support rep told him that even though his system had "P100" (my friends' term) memory in it, and that that worked fine for Windows 98, he'd have to get "P133" memory for the system if he wanted to run Windows ME (p.s. he was trying to upgrade the system that he bought for his 4 year old since some of the 3-D games, like Putt-Putt, were freezing up <G> ). My friend wanted to know what P100 and P133 memory was and why it mattered. Obviously, at least one of them was confused, and more importantly, my high-tech-savvy friend had no idea what memory technologies existed.
And while I'm rambling, another case in point -- I was in Northern Central Kansas visiting a cousin last week (Lebanon, though I don't think you'll find it on any maps <G>, but look for the exact geographic center of the continental 48 states, then go 1.4 miles southeast from there. The town is so dying/dead that the back wall fell off the bank building in the central intersection of town while I was there [obviously, it was an empty building <G>]) . Anyway, my cousin had a system with 32M that ran very slowly, so we ordered another 128M for $25 from Crucial. She was someone who I would claim represented "Jane America" and she was completely and totally clueless as to what was in her system, how much was in her system, where it was in her system, and so on. Without me, she would have had no idea whatsoever that her system could even be sped up, let alone how to do it.
The main problem for RDRAM is that "Jane America" is focused more on budget than performance.
Just my 2 cents...
Dave |
