Daily Digest
LinkedIn and CNBC team up
CNBC and social networking site LinkedIn announced
Thursday a strategic alliance.
Under the deal, CNBC will provide articles, blogs,
financial data and video across the LinkedIn network,
while CNBC will integrate the social networking site’s
functionality into its CNBC.com site to allow LinkedIn’s
user base to share comments about the news within
their network of friends and business contacts.
Users of both sites are expected to notice these changes
in the fourth quarter. And, as part of the deal, portions
of CNBC’s content will provide a revenue sharing ar-
rangement with LinkedIn.
Nvidia, AMD gaming graphics buck
green-PC trend
There is an ungreen revolution taking place in en-
thusiast game PC circles.
The eye-opening graphics possible on today’s game
PCs come at a cost: light-dimming power consumption.
The trend, rooted in the perennial quest for more speed,
bucks the overall greening of the PC industry.
Green PC designs have become more than just prac-
tical; they’re cool. Power-sipping Netbooks are in, as
are small desktops like the Dell Studio Hybrid and
Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Slimline.
This is not the case for high-end gaming PCs, where
bigger is better. How far this trend can go isn’t clear,
but a seminal event in Apple’s history may offer a les-
son. In 2001, Apple unveiled one of the first dual-
processor consumer systems, based on the overheating-
prone IBM PowerPC G4 processor. The original Apple
tower design had a Rube Goldberg feel to it, with a host
of fans straining to rid the system of heat. A noise like
that emitted by a wind tunnel, generated by the power
supply and fans, forced Apple to redesign the system.
This symbolized why Apple eventually abandoned
PowerPC: The platform wasn’t efficient with power.
Fast-forward to 2008. Game rig makers are cram-
ming as many as four graphics chips into high-end boxes
that are notable not only for performance but also for
the power they consume. As a consequence, big power
supply units are in vogue. Today, bragging rights ex-
tend to the units themselves: some systems boasting
1
boutique brand names such as Cooler Master and Sil-
verStone draw 1,200 watts–roughly three times the power
requirements of game systems a few years ago.
It’s an ominous trend, according to box makers. ”If
this trend does continue, then, yes, it will give us prob-
lems,” said George Yang, an engineer at Los Angeles-
based game rig maker IBuyPower. ”A regular home
user would have to have an electrician come in, get the
outlet out, and plug in a higher breaker,” Yang said.
Today, some of the higher-end systems with big power
supplies require a special wall power socket, according
to Yang.
Other game rig makers are equally concerned. ”I
swore that I’d never break 1,000 (watts),” said Kelt
Reeves, president of game PC maker Falcon Northwest.
”Unfortunately, that’s been the solution for the past
several years. Bigger, bigger, bigger power supplies.”
Reeves says that 1,200 watts is now essential for
gaming systems based on multiple boards from Nvidia
or AMD’s ATI graphics unit. ”With three GTX 280s
or two of the R700 cards, we’re recommending they go
with a 1,200-watt power supply,” Reeves said, referring
to the newest graphics chips from Nvidia and ATI re-
spectively.
This is just about the limit, he said. ”We can’t go
too much more over that before–if you actually pull
that (power)–you start tripping the client’s household
circuit breaker.”
Neither Nvidia nor ATI show any signs of slowing
down, according to Reeves. ”Eventually these chips
get so hot that their own heat becomes a barrier to
performance,” he said.
Nvidia admits that its chips are drawing more power
than before. ”If we go back about three years, our
graphics card power was in the 120- to 130-watt range,”
said Jason Paul, product manager in charge of enthusi-
ast GPUs (graphics processing units) at Nvidia. ”The
GTX 280 which we launched a couple of months back,
it’s around 230 watts (of) graphics card power,” he said.
But Paul claims the performance per watt is the key
yardstick, not raw power. ”Where you see a little under
2X increase in maximum power, you’ve seen probably
3-times or 4-times (the) increase in the level of perfor-
mance. So, overall we see a substantial improvement in
performance per watt. This is the big metric we track
to ensure we’re delivering efficient architectures. ”
Paul says Nvidia has implemented power savings
techniques on its GTX 280 that keep the power down
when it’s not running at top performance loads. ”With
the GTX 280 at idle, that card runs at about 25 watts,
which is one-tenth of its absolute worst-case power,” he
said. Nvidia also offers hybrid graphics technology that
turns off all the power-sucking boards when they’re not
in use.
Moreover, Paul says that the multiboard systems
are limited to a small niche at the very top of the mar-
ket. ”There’s definitely a segment of the market that
wants more and more performance. Remember, how-
ever, that this is the ultimate performance (segment).”
But game box makers ship many–if not most–of
their systems to the very niche that Paul is describ-
ing. ”We’re all about the high end. The higher-end the
graphics card is, and the more expensive, the more we
sell,” said Reeves.
And the trend in power supplies exemplifies how
this market has changed. ”The power supply used to be
just silver box, and nobody gave it a second thought,”
he said. ”(But) as graphics cards have evolved, they
have forced the power supply makers to keep providing
more and more power pipes–or cabling–to the graphics
cards”–increasing the unit’s complexity, he said.
Reeves cites GPUs, not CPUs from Intel, as the
culprit. ”The latest CPUs use very little wattage. If
you overclock a 3GHz Intel CPU to 4GHz, you might
pull 40 more watts. Whereas a graphics card, you put
three of them in a system, they’ll pull 800 watts running
some of the higher-end games,” he said.
Samsung agrees to sell Symbian stake to
Nokia
Samsung Electronics has agreed to sell its invest-
ment stake in Symbian to mobile phone maker Nokia,
according to a Reuters report.
In June, Nokia announced plans to acquire the re-
maining stake in smartphone software developer Sym-
bian that it didn’t already own. Nokia, by having full
ownership of Symbian, wants to beat back the compe-
tition from Apple’s iPhone and other competitors by
accelerating its product development and serve as an
open-source operating system platform for other hand-
set makers, wireless carriers, and software developers.
Nokia, according to the Reuters report on Tuesday,
will pay 410 million for its Symbian stake.
30.txt
Polls and Palin
A guest post from Slate’s and The Big Money’s Jim
Ledbetter:
2
The Sarah Palin narrative is incomplete and will
likely remain so even after her speech tonight. Nonethe-
less, I perceive a nagging gap between the way the me-
dia is so far discussing her candidacy and the way that
polls indicate it is being received. Palin IS interesting
to women and even appealing; as ”XX Factor” noted
yesterday, women are discussing her and her family and
her situation with great vigor and energy. The media
is making legitimate efforts to capture those conversa-
tions, dissect, and analyze them. But there is next to
no evidence that this interest translates into increased
female support for the GOP ticket. Quite the opposite,
per Rasmussen Reports:
If McCain’s strategy was to reach out to women vot-
ers, however, thus far it hasn’t been successful. The
night after the announcement, slightly more women
voters viewed Palin as the right choice for McCain’s
running mate, but now 41 say she was not, versus 36
who still believe she was a good choice. Forty-one per-
cent (41) of women say they are less likely now to vote
for McCain because of Palin, as opposed to 31 who say
they are more likely to support him. Women voters
were essentially even on this question in the earlier sur-
vey.
Men still back McCain’s decision. Forty-one per-
cent (41) say she was the right choice, while 37 dis-
agree. Earlier, men favored the decision by a 43 to
31 margin. Forty-three percent (43) of men voters say
they are more likely to vote for McCain because of his
choosing of Palin as a running mate, but 34 say they
are less likely to do so. This is a jump in support from
the earlier survey. But even a plurality of men (47) say
Palin is not ready to be president in the event of the
72-year-old McCain being incapacitated while in the
White House, although 32 believe she is ready. Women
voters by a nearly two-to-one margin believe Palin is
not ready.
Now, ok, a sizable portion of both men and women
are unsure, and all these numbers are subject to change.
Still, I find it staggering that two out of three women
say Palin is unqualified to be president, and that more
women say the choice of Palin makes them LESS likely
to vote for McCain, while more men say it makes them
MORE likely. Three conclusions from this: 1) As Ann
Hulbert and others have argued, the Palin choice may
well have been aimed at conservative men, who find
that she shores up the ticket’s ”values” credential. 2)
There is a big difference between women talking about
Palineven admiring herand women’s desire to vote Re-
publican. 3) The media in general has yet to figure out
how to frame stories involving a nationwide female can-
didate whose chief political appeal seems to be to men.
29.txt
 American Wife
It was striking to see Laura Bush onstage last night
after watching Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama speak
last week. Laura looked stiff and uncomfortable, de-
spite her smiles; she swiveled her head almost roboti-
cally toward and away from the camera, and her eyes
had the tight look of someone disconnected from what
she was saying. A few weeks ago I was at a dinner party
with some people from Texas who used to know Laura
Bush pretty welland who had liked her. They invoked
the usual things people invoke when they talk about
who the private Laura Bush once was: a funny, smart
jazz lover. A sometime smoker who cared a lot about
education. And they said the question all her friends
kept asking was: How can she stand by and watch as
her husband makes so many bad decisions?
Curtis Sittenfeld’s newly released American Wife, a
novel about a woman named Alice Blackwell, aims to
answer that exact question. Alice is based loosely on
Laura Bush. She’s a shy, bookish girl from Wisconsin
who grows up to be the wife of a jokey born-again for-
mer alcoholic who runs for president only to launch a
deeply unpopular war. American Wife didn’t go very
far, in my view, toward dramatizing the inner life of this
woman. But it does make you think quite a lot about
the peculiarity of being a first ladyan inherently passive
role that is both simpler and more complicated than
being Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton-as-candidate. In
the book, Alice asks herself, ”If I believed I could have
made a difference but instead remained silent, then how
could I bear it?” Choosing silence at a moment when
more and more women are choosing to find their voice
on the political stageand to some degree just succeeding
in finding itmust have a special poignancy. Or maybe
it’s a special kind of complicity. The book did make me
wonder what, in her case, I would do. On the one hand,
I believe a marriage is a private space; on the other, I
wouldn’t be able to swallow my own feelings in order to
”support” my husband without question in the public
eye. I’m curious to know what other XXers thinkare
you sympathetic to Laura or not? Will the role of first
spouse change over time, as more couples with ”new
marriages” take residency in the White House?
28.txt
Why I’m Rooting for Bristol Palin
Linda Hirshman has a thoughtful piece in Slate re-
acting to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy and pointing out
that no, no one wants their 17-year-old daughter to get
pregnant. The odds are stacked against teen mothers,
no doubt. But so many stories I read on this topic
present those scary numbers, add a brief caveat that
”of course there are exceptions, but” and go on to rail
against pro-lifers for wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade.
3
If you’ll indulge me for a few minutes, I’d like to
hit ”pause” and tell you about one of those exceptions.
My mom got pregnant when she was 16. With me.
Thankfully, it was 1972, before Roe, or we might not be
having this conversation. Well, the rest of you would
be. She and my dad had to get married in the little
side chapel of their church, not at the grander main
altar, because of her ”condition.” Before they even got
that far, a few of my mom’s cousins called a family
meeting and decided my mom had to have an abortion
lest she embarrass the family. I guess you’d call them
pro-choice.
My mom finished high school a year early so she
wouldn’t have to juggle a baby and classes. She and
my dad lived in a tiny apartment, and saved up to buy
a modest house when I was 6 months old. (My first car
cost more than that house.) My dad worked five days
a week at one job, and on one of his days off, he’d work
at my grandfather’s clothing store to make the 17 they
needed for the weekly grocery bill.
Eventually, my parents bought their own business,
a mom-and-pop grocery store. It didn’t make them
millionaires, and it required a lot of blood, sweat, and
tears, but they worked side-by-side for more than 20
years. They still found time to haul us to swimming
practice and baseball practice and come to our games
and help us with our homework. And they did well
enough to put two kids through college, set aside a nest
egg for retirement, and start college funds for their ever-
expanding brood of grandchildren. More than 35 years
later, they’re still happily married.
Yes, my parents were an exception, very clearly. But
today is not the 1960s or 1970s, either. Young women
have vastly more opportunities in high school for sports
and other activities that keep them busy and improve
their self-esteem. Birth control is more readily avail-
able. For girls who do get pregnant, schoolsboth high
schools and collegehave more programs to help moms
get their educations and support themselves and their
children. Let’s empower our daughters to make the
right choices for themselves, to either avoid sex when
they’re not ready or use birth control when they do.
And if all else fails, love them and support them and, if
you’re running for vice president and the world is going
to find out, stand up and tell the world you’re proud
of them. Yes, it takes hard work, and it takes sacri-
fice. Are we not raising our kidsdaughters and sonsto
work hard, to put the needs of others ahead of their
own when the situation calls for it?
Whenever we have conversations about Roe v. Wade,
pro-choicers always point to how awful life is for women
who keep their babies, how hard it is. Hirshman de-
cries the Republican position on abortion as ”cruel.”
But can’t we please acknowledge that there are victims,
and that the pro-choice position has its own brutal cru-
elty? Does anyone consider how many worthwhile lives
are sacrificed? Is it worse to grow up poor or not at
all? My own life is pretty damn important to me, and
I’m thankful every day that I’m here.
So, while everyone else is snickering and making
jokes about shotgun weddings, I’d like to wish Bristol
Palin, her boyfriend Levi, and their child the best. It’s
not an easy job you have before you, but the rewards
can be amazing.