Obama hits McCain HARD on Big Oil Contributions

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Best ad of the campaign, ladies and gents.


“Every time you fill your tank, the oil companies fill their pockets. Now Big Oil’s filling John McCain’s campaign with 2 million dollars in contributions. Because instead of taxing their windfall profits to help drivers, McCain wants to give them another 4 billion in tax breaks. After one president in the pocket of big oil, we can’t afford another.”


Brilliant. This spot not only holds Bush's energy policies directly responsible for record gas prices, it ties McSame to those policies. And the proposal to give each taxpayer $1,000 right out of the pockets of Big Oil is a stroke of genius, forcing McSame to take ExxonMobil's side (which he's already doing) over Joe Taxpayer's.

Democrats have not sufficiently hammered Bush/Cheney on gas prices. President Harken and Vice President Halliburton let Big Oil write our energy policies -- no one should be surprised about the fix we're in. Add that collusion to their brilliant foreign policy of antagonizing oil-rich countries like Venezuela and Russia, coddling the Saudis and launching disastrous wars in the Middle East, and it's difficult to imagine who could've done better for Texaco and Shell.

I hope the Obama camp keeps this up. Take the fight right to them. Put them on defense.

Obama's speech on energy policy, which he delivered in Michigan today, is here. More sticking it to McSame and Bush. Beautiful.

Intel discusse Larrabee, a possible ATI and Nvidia killer, launching as early as 2009

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While Intel's Larrabee might not be a household name for consumers just yet, it's certainly at the table where Nvidia and AMD/ATI eat. The many-core (8 to 48, at least, according to that Intel graphic) x86 chip runs all your existing apps while tossing in support for OpenGL and DirectX thus eliminating the need for a discrete graphics chip. At least that's the plan. While the exact number of cores remains a secret as does the performance of each core compared to current GPUs, given the importance Intel places on Larrabee, it's reasonable to assume that an 8-core chip will launch in 2009 or 2010 with comparable performance to GPUs on the market at that time. Intel does say that Larrabee cores will scale "almost linearly" (read: within 10%) in games; that means that a 16-core chip will offer nearly twice the performance of an 8-core chip, 32-cores twice that of 16, and so on. Apparently this has already been proven in-house with Intel name-dropping Larrabee-coded titles such as Gears of War, FEAR, and Half-Life 2, Episode 2. It's no coincidence then to hear that Intel's first Larrabee product will target PC gamers. Click through if you're just dying to read about Larrabee's 1024 bits-wide bi-directional ring network and other bits of technical wonderment sure to create at least the hint of a silicon malaise.

News via CNET and Washington Post

Rob Enderle does not know the meaning of surrender. Or disclosure.

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It’s no secret that I'm not a big fan of “analyst” Rob Enderle, but to me, this takes the cake. In his latest “column” on TechNewsWorld, among discussions of Steve Jobs’s health, Enderle also talks up Dell’s plans to launch a digital music player and download service, which we discussed last week—and, as you might remember, a project that Enderle himself is a consultant on.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Enderle’s piece:

The Wall Street Journal got wind of a secret project at Dell to possibly take the music lead away from Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), but not necessarily the device lead, making it kind of interesting.

[…]

What Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) believes, and I agree, is that folks don’t want to spend lots of time managing music — they just want to listen to it. The fact that few refresh the music on their iPods is a clear indicator that there is untapped potential here, even with iPod owners.

[…]

It has to provide more choices among better services — while containing complexity and creating a great user experience — to be successful. It can be done; we’ll know in a few months whether Dell can do it. I’m not sure I’d bet against Michael Dell.


Yet, nowhere in the article does Enderle mention that he has been hired by Dell to consult on the project. Classy. Or—to put it another way—of questionable ethics.

Is Enderle bound by journalistic ethics? Technically, he’s an analyst, not a journalist, but given that he’s writing a column on a site where it will be disseminated alongside news content, it seems at the very least awkward that he not mention his involvement in this project.

Just another tickmark in the questions column for: why the heck would anybody hire this guy?