Financial doom and gloom hitting Intel?
"High-tech bellwether Intel Corp. has lowered its financial projections for the third quarter, providing the latest sign of the U.S. economy's doldrums," is the lead for this story at CNN.com. Normally, I'd lose all respect for CNN at this point except that it went on to note that. "Intel isn't living up to expectations because the global economy appears to be losing steam, said Andy Bryant, Intel's chief financial officer. "What we are seeing is pretty uniform around the world," Bryant told analysts during a Thursday conference call."

Okay, so CNN took the word of Intel's CFO so maybe I shouldn't judge them so harshly. But wait, Bryant said it was the fault of the global economy, not a sign of the U.S.' economy tanking by its lonesome --as CNN states. Then there's this other small thing --INTEL CAN'T GET ITS NEW CHIPS TO MARKET!! Hasn't anybody else been following the bouncing ball here? Hasn't anybody else noticed that 3.6GHz Pentium 4 CPUs are about as rare as a speedy paycheck from a magazine?

Now let's look at the Piece of Resistance: We're all fed up and leaning over the vomitorium with the processors we have now. There's nothing we can do so much better with a 3.6GHz CPU than we could do with a 3GHz processor. (Sure, there's stuff I could do with one, but normal people really don't have a need.) Just how much faster should a game play in a test than any human being could possibly play it in real life? Then there's the PCI Express problem. How many folks out there would really upgrade their CPU and motherboard but aren't because the new motherboards have PCIe slots that will force them to kick up another $400 on a new graphics card?

Perhaps, before CNN points a finger of blame somewhere, the folk there should a.) Listen to what the speaker is saying, and b.) Understand the totality of events that may be the real cause of what they're reporting about. Back in the Dark Ages, when I conned NYU into giving me a Journalism Wax Tablet, that's what reporting was supposed to be about...

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