You can have my money when you earn it. Stop standing in the way of progress. I can now watch a movie from the comfort of my own home, without the sticky floors or 10 minutes of commercials preceeding it.
Current copyright lawsuits are not promoting the progress of science. Computers are here to stay, and innovators are enabling me to watch a movie after my toddler goes to bed. I'm willing to give someone money in exchange for this innovative convenience, but none of the copyright holders wants to take it.
I'd pay for commercial free TV episodes I could watch on my own schedule, too, if I didn't have to wait 5 years for the DVD to come out, but that's a topic for a different day. They think my eyeballs are worth money to advertisers, huh? Why won't they take it from me directly?
Maybe, I am waxing "intellectual", but the fact that the x86 with its ugly instruction set and gross addressing modes has dominated the market really disappoints me. Why can't the better (from an engineering point of view) instruction set architecture (i.e. PowerPC) win in the desktop market?
Consider it this way: The 8088 was a good decision for the IBM PC. It had the CISC mentality when the FSB was the same speed as the on chip clock. With 0 and later 1 level of metal, it had limited power, but it worked "well enough". Applications came out for this cheap computer, and it thrived. Since you discuss the "engineering point of view", I'll assume you know what happened in the following years.
1990. x86 was getting long in the tooth. 386 was a major thing, and 486 had some nice speed improvements, but little additional functionality. 68k was running out of gas, and everybody else's CISC was just clamoring for some freedom. This was the turning point, when anybody could have taken the lead. Intel, as we all know, wrapped a translator around a RISC core and made the HUGE (monstrous in size and power) 66MHz Pentium (those that failed speed sorting were sold at 60MHz). Everybody else -- Alpha, PowerPC, Sparc, PA-RISC and even ARM to a lesser degree -- had an opportunity, but Intel kept compatibility. Since then, Intel has been able to make slight improvements to the translator, add a few whistles (MMX, MMX2, SSE, SSE2) and rice out the RISC core to keep up. Today, compilers are a known constant. There may be some x86 hand tuning to do, but for the most part the basic x86 instruction set has done everything there is to do -- so Intel is free to hack up their translator and make the RISC core as fast as they can.
HP has all but put the last nail in the coffins for PA-RISC and Alpha, Fuji is starting to do something real with Sparc (forget Sun, they stopped really trying on the processor front 5 years ago). PowerPC is struggling with a lack of application support for either AIX or a low end home system. The MiniMac has a chance to increase PowerPC volumes, which may be the crowbar to increase application support on the consumer front.
The original AIM idea was that Motorola and Apple would continue what they had done with the Mac and IBM was going to take over the Intel world with PowerPC running PCs running OS/2 (later WinNT). Turns out, IBM isn't priced to take the cheap consumers and isn't glitzy enough to take the consumers with money to burn.
I use vim almost exclusively. Most people use either vim or elvis symlinked from vi and don't know it, although vi is its own program. I can come up with 26 letters [a-z], 10 numbers [0-9], shift (gotta hit that "!" you know), escape and colon. Then we can't forget / for the searches and replaces, \ to be able to match special characters, and newbies will want the arrow keys instead of h, j, k and i.
Your humor isn't lost on me, but a seasoned vi user will use at least 41 keys, 45 for the inexperienced. The other 8 must be for Emacs.
after 10 years of programming names and numbers into phone systems via the keypad, I actually no longer look at the phone keypad as I use it; but I've only ever noticed that skill in phone techs who install systems.
I had a summer job at Mervyn's 10+ years ago and the register had a keypad that matched the Bell layout. When the scanner wouldn't read a UPC code, I typed it without looking down. My hit ratio was higher because my eyes never left the number stream. Some customers didn't trust my number entry and insisted that I show them they were identical.
The only way for spam to finally be filtered and gone would be for the government to make it a felony to send spam
Government of what? Of the Planet Earth?
Excuse me, but you, Americans, aren't the only nation in the world who sends spam.
I'm getting tired of hearing non-USians complaining about being ignored. Are you telling me that you think the US government outlawing spam would have zero effect on worldwide spam? Or that if the governments of the world outlawed spam it would have no effect outside of America? For all I know, "felony" is a concept that holds worldwide meaning -- a crime for which there are serious penalties. For all I know, if all the first world nations declared spam a serious crime (everything from stealing bandwidth to fraud in headers), it would not only benefit America.
The Internet started in the US, with US tax dollars (military and later educational). Today, it's worldwide. Things that affect the Internet start everywhere -- including:insert your country name here:. Things you do affect us, and vice versa. If we all work together unilaterally, we all have a universal impact. Slashdot may lean towards the American side of things and post things during American time zones, but that's one website. You're welcome to frequent any website that caters to your needs (or complain when you're too lazy to do so, but I can complain about your complaints just as loudly).
That's without a DVD-ROM or any Software except XP Home (the Mac comes with the full version of OSX not a cut down version).
So you've got to add XP-Pro (at least), DVD-ROM, Quicken 2005, Office and a Video editing suite
*then* start comparing prices.
To quote Colonel Potter, "HORSE HOCKEY". Stop wasting everybody's time justifying a price with features some of us don't care about.
I'm a Mac fan. Let me go on the record as saying that. If I want to compare prices between an entry Mac and a Shuttle, but I don't need an expensive OS, a DVD-ROM, Quicken, a paid for Office suite or any video editing suite, I can just walk down to Fry's Electronics, find a Shuttle I like and look up the price of a system that meets my needs. I don't need to add software just to compare, I'm a consumer! I can compare entry Mac against entry PC any way I want! If the Mac comes with stuff I don't need, it's wasted resource and there's no value. In economic circles, I'm paying the opportunity cost, but not getting the benefit -- a loss in economic efficiency.
Compare what you want with a Minimac. I'll compare the OS that I prefer (MacOS X) against my favorite PC OS (Debian unstable) on some low end hardware and you can bet I won't add in the software for the Shuttle that I don't care about. MacOSX plus my percieved quality of a Mac are alone worth doubling the cost to get up to $499 + the cost of enough memory to actually do something.
You're talking like the idiots who say the only way to compare the cost of a new Mac with a customizable video card (read as PowerMac G5) is to compare with a dual Xeon with XP Pro and all the wizbang whistles added on, when all I want is a nice single processor Athlon with a top of the line nVidia processor and a gig of RAM. If you're not using those features (I don't need wireless, I have CAT5e just fine and don't get me started on charging everybody for optical sound when so few of us care), leave them out! Don't be an idiot and start adding useless features to justify a purchase!
Add up the price of the features YOU WANT for each platform. Acknowledge any value increase the software or hardware of either platform in your features and prices, then make an educated decision. For me, a new Mac with OSX is worth far more than the $129 upgrade price Apple charges, and that goes into it. Style is worth something, too, but recent PCs have come part way. There aren't many PCs that are as beautiful and functionally aesthetic as the PowerMac G5, and that may be worth something too.
I'll probably be picking up a Minimac in a year with the VGA to S-Video adapter ($19) to be my home entertainment system. I don't care about Quicken, Office or video editing (for chrissake, who the hell has time for that crap?), I just want VLC and a Mac on my TV. Around that time, my 1GHz PowerBook G4 may also be due for an upgrade, and I'll take advantage of eBay and the value retention of the Mac -- another value add of the platform for me.
Currently, the fastest continuous shooting digital camera (the Nikon D2X) can only take 4 shots in a row before its memory buffers get full and the whole camera becomes useless. Compare that with the 9 shots per second F5 and you can see that the speed of shooting isn't going to cut it for digital cameras.
We need a compression method that is lossless, not one that creates compact files. Space is cheap, CPU cycles aren't.
"My" first computer was a 286 with a 10 MB RLL hard drive. I actually improved my performance by running Stacker -- a hard drive doubling program. It did on the fly compression and decompression transparent to the applications. The fun part was that the puny CPU could uncompress a drive in less than 50% of the time it took to write it. Put another way, it took 100% (defined) to write a certain set of data, without compression. An average workload had 50% of the data to write after compression to the hard drive but it cost an extra 20-30% to generate the compressed data -- resulting in the remaining 20-30% being observed as increased drive performance.
I won't pretend to be an expert at digital photography. Some people can't handle even JPG compression, so they write raw files. From what I've read, those cameras are largely dominated by the write performance of the media (typically flash). If this is the case, it seems like interleaving the data (similar to RAID striping for you software guys) over multiple flash cards (or subarrays inside a high performance flash card) may be a possible way to go. On the other hand, if the workload can handle JPG compression, I would not accept it as assumed that the CPU can't be harnessed to increase write performance because of the decrease in time spent writing to slow media.
And I would expect if there's a market for $1000+ cameras for the pros that the camera vendors can find a CPU that's cheap enough to take advantage of any compression algorithm that generates better pictures and/or better performance.
Re the Hindenburg incident: there is now fair evidence that the whole thing happened not because the hydrogen is flamable (it was in airtight balloons, and any hydrogen leaking out was highly vented), but because of the envelope fabric, that had cellulose acetate butyrate coating, which is highly flamable and prone to cause static electricity. If the blimp had been filled with helium, a ravaging fire would have engulfed its skin anyway, but with less violence. The hydrogen gas here was a facilitant more than a cause of the disaster.
Conventional wisdom tells us that hydrogen made everybody burn to death on the Hindenburg, and that's why it was a disaster. Actually, you're right in that the hydrogen burning wasn't the problem. Hydrogen is even better at floating than helium. Get a balloon with hydrogen in it and it'll float much quicker than helium -- and leak out much faster too. With the Hindenburg, the hydrogen fire was out very quickly. The gas went straight up, far from people, and burned itself out very quickly. Sure, the coating may have been a highly flammable acetate compound as you point out (this point is contested), but what if you have a bunch of people on an airship when the bouancy floats away? The airship falls. Interestingly enough, most of the casualties from the Hindenburg were people who fell to their deaths and there wasn't much time for jumping.
That's nice and all, but long ago Commander Taco told us that the comments only got ~5000 pageviews. Double that because time has passed. We know that the front page gets loaded a bunch more than that, maybe hundreds of times per day? Face it, toying with the comments page has no impact.
I've been looking at the Koolance kit lately. If it weren't for all the crap about the "Slashvertisement", I'd be able to see some interesting user reviews from my peers who actually bit the bullet. You know, people who didn't get a preview sample, motivated to give it a positive review so they continue to get free stuff -- real people who have no vested interest in the continued success or failure of the product.
A Slashvertisement may or may not be a real thing, but it gives us comment-dwellers a chance to discuss products we've seen in action and the rest a chance to read about their satisfaction. Additionally, college students are home for Christmas break. Slashops are getting fewer articles submitted, so we'll have some of the dregs for a few days. Deal with it. At least it's better than summer vacation.
Let his wife? Let?!?!?! You sir, are obviously not married.... The only fault I can find with the author is that he didn't realise what his wife was dealing with in the first place. She should be using Firefox for browsing
My wife has a mind of her own. Let me tell you this: if she runs IE, it's not my fault. It's her computer. If I don't realize what she's doing, it's my fault for not invading her privacy and that's where that ends.
Nor do they have any way of varifying that my one phone call wont do the exact same, nor yours, nor anyone elses. We have the presumption of innocence in this country, and it's one of those troublesome rights given to us by our misguided founders. Of course, I'd like to make a phone call in that same situation, I'm sure you would too, but it's ok to forget about due process if it's someone else, right?
We have the presumption of innocence in the US, certainly. The police also have the burden of protecting the populace. They had a great big uncertainty cloud surrounding Mitnick -- they had no idea what he was capable of, or his real motivations. It's easy for those of us who have studied his case to understand how mistreated he was, but for the police who didn't know if he would be able to use the phone line and damage the general populace, this was a very simple decision.
The Bill of Rights says nothing about my one phone call. I think it would be very reasonable for the police to call a lawyer for someone whose phone skills are in question. Heck, maybe the police should just drive down to the address of that lawyer, or some other designate of the accused. Mitnick's case was filled with things that make it different from Joe Sixpack getting pulled over for DUI. It was a very non-standard crime with little prescedent. Stuff went wrong and part of it was the police acting to protect us from things that they didn't understand.
Real: Congrats on the reverse engineering. It's great when a product can be extended beyond the original intent and do more stuff or do the same stuff better. Additional file formats and additional services in the market are only a benefit for the consumer. Choice is good.
Apple: Congrats on the update, whether necessary or not, that bollocksed up the Real software. The Apple iPod experience involves a consistant interface and a consistant experience with iTunes that leads consumers to try out OSX. It's your software update, it's the consumer's choice to run it, just as it is the consumer's right to make a non-standard update and try out Real choices. Anything that Apple can do to improve their already great product is great for their present and future customers.
Everybody wins. Real gets some spare change and a little extra publicity. Apple gets a software update out there to help out their customers who seek additional support. If I can remind everybody, this software update actually includes stuff some people might want (hearing the click wheel through the headphones is a welcome feature in my mind). It is not Apple's responsibility to help Real out, and Real signed up for this arms race. I'm going to keep Real stuff off my iPod and enjoy the software updates... if I ever need to replace my original 5gig iPod that they're done releasing updates for.
If I had 15-20 extra minutes to spend every time I go to the store, I'd probably be better off spending it cooking or cleaning the kitchen. If I had a hundred bucks to spend on a bar code printer, I'd probably be better off spending it on better quality food. This whole scenario is a classic example of "goal displacement," the goal of cooking is to provide a healthy diet of tasty food, it's not an inventory management problem or a time management problem. Peoples' diets are getting worse because they're treating cooking like a trip to a gas station, a task that must be taken care of and gotten out of the way.
I'm bad at meal planning. I'm bad at knowing what I've got. I've considered something like what this guy proposes -- basically a program that knows a bunch of healthy recipies and a TiVo like thumbs up / thumbs down for future reference system. Such a system could quickly learn what I like and don't and tell me what minimum foodstuffs to buy to make healthy meals for the next week.
The last time I was left to my own devices, I ate pasta, italian sausage and maranara sauce for 2 weeks straight. I broke the monotony with a single serving of Weight Watchers frozen pizza and then went back to the pasta. I like healthy foods, make no mistake. I just can't pick something out when I have to and will fall back on my favorites.
Automated systems can take all the joy out of life. But they can replace mundane parts of our lives that we don't manage well anyway and manage them better while leaving us time to do the things we want.
To make matters worse, they've convinced people here that "ultra-pasturized" means "better", even though it just means they used extra high temperatures to get it done more quickly and save money at the expense of flavor. That means the milk here doesn't taste nearly as good as it could under the current regulations.
On a whim and out of curiousity, I once bought a half gallon of organic milk. Normally milk goes to waste in my fridge, going bad in 5 days while it would take me 7-8 to actually finish the smallest of containers. This organic milk, on the other hand, lasted the whole week it took to consume. Strange thing, I thought, must be something they add to the feed of conventionally fed cows. Then I found a cheaper organic milk, tried it out, and voila, it went bad after 5 days just like my ordinary conventional milk. When next in the store, I read the containers. All the milks were merely pasteurized except for my spontaneously bought organic milk -- which was ultra-pasteurized. My conclusion: If I don't have to buy two containers of milk per week, spending 25% more for organic ultra-pasteurized milk is saving me 75% on milk.
I have to look really hard to find ultra-pasteurized milk. I can't tell the difference, but I only like skim anyway (due to childhood lactose intolerance, I didn't really grow up accustomed to the taste of milk). I'm not convinced that ultra-pasteurization really means better, only that it's worth paying a premium for in order to save myself money.
So, let me see if I get this straight. The networks are going to stab each other in order to keep me roped in. They're going to end and begin shows so that, not only can I not manually change the channel at the right time, but not even my TiVo can keep up?
Gee, it's really too bad you can't download TV shows from the Internet from a legal provider that either charges per show or keeps commercials. It seems like I can either choose not to watch shows, choose to miss introductions and / or resolutions, or violate copyright and enjoy every show as it was written and performed in their entirety (after editing anyway).
I've got a friend who has 2 TiVos and a PVR from his cable company because the networks play this game. I do not consider that an option. Managing which one has which subscription is quite a chore. I'd much rather launch an AVI from a single directory.
That's great! Will he tell us why Dark Angel jumped the shark late in the first season?
The premise was good SciFi fare. Genetically enhanced superhumans using today's ultra-hip-lingo as if it would never go out of style. One of these, Max, is determined to find her brothers and sisters and not have a relationship to the handicapped guy to whom she is desperately attracted. Then Cameron had to introduce mutants that messed up all the "almost believable" part.
Re:Top Five reasons why the space program should b
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That's right, and the inherent scientific value was irrefutable of the subjects studied by Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Marconi, Einstein, Bohr, Feynmann, etc etc, and at the time there was little real world application to any of their studies either.
You seem to propose studying the technology of today instead of investing anything for the pure sciences, which would yield the technology of tomorrow. If people with your mindset had their way for the past few centuries, then as an example we'd have highly-optimized wooden cartwheels and metal bearings for our horse chariots, but would know nothing of combustion engines, much less automobiles and aircraft.
First off, I support space exploration. I was playing devil's advocate with my parent poster.
Secondly, I'll continue in that role to respond to you. You are implying that, merely because I stated space exploration may not be the right way to spend our resources that I am against all progress. Yet, you paraphrase me: "Why not invest incredible amounts of money in some targetted industries and in some "emerging" industries with higher financial risks / humanitarian rewards?". Just because I don't think making a space station whose sole purpose is to support astronauts that will babysit it full time is a good idea does not make me against progress. Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Marconi, Einstein, Bohr, Feymann, Curie, Watson, Franklin -- sure science is good. Man has come so far in understanding his world. Understanding the universe is a good idea too, but the US is not in a position to undertake a leadership role while provoking the rest of the planet. We understand so much, yet we act on so little. We should concentrate on industries that will generate near term benfits, AND spend some money on the "long shot" "emerging" technologies. The problem with using space vehicles as the tool for "emerging" technologies is the enormous cost associated with just sustaining the project before you can launch your first telescope that will explain weak forces.
I support space exploration; comparing the fantastic knowledge we're gaining from space these days to any number of prestigous predescessors on whose shoulders we now stand is a bit of a far fetch. The knowledge is great. It may some day have a practical application. Today, however, I believe we have geopolitical battles to fight and cannot responsibly continue with a space program for purely scientific reasons. Reconcile my support for a space program with my claim that it is irresponsible to undertake space exploration for scientific reasons in whatever political way you see fit.
Re:Top Five reasons why the space program should b
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Space exploration is cool. I support it. Please allow me to be a devil's advocate:
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
It seems to me that first world countries are having trouble keeping people procreating. The more advanced the society, the more rights the women, the better things the women have to do than sit at home and rear a half dozen to a dozen kids. Countries like Canada only grow because of immigration. Is it Taiwan that is trying to encourage procreation with subsidies?
4. Every dollar invested in NASA pays off seven dollars in terms of technological development for the US economy.
NASA is, by every account, a grossly large organization with bureaucracy the likes of which no other entity in the world can hope to measure up to. They're too bureaucratic to save the Challenger. Why not invest incredible amounts of money in some targetted industries (A mach 10 aircraft has little real world application today) and in some "emerging" industries with higher financial risks / humanitarian rewards?
3. We must expand from Earth to escape the threat of civilization-ending natural disasters, like a supervolcano, which could lower global temperatures below freezing for years. The chance of dying in a civilization-ending event is 1/455. Not to be grim, but that's 10 times more likely than dying in an commercial aircraft.
Most of the world ending scenarios seem to have other, potentially more beneficial solutions. Sure, leaving the world to go to the moon or someplace else may be a good way to spread the risk. It would be quite some time to set up the infrastructure to support a self sustaining populace that would not suffer from inbreeding. We may get to the point where this is possible, but NASA is not heading down a path to enable this. If there's a scenario that leads to a (nuclear or CO2) winter, why aren't we making subterrainian cities 10+ feet underground? I would expect one could even justify this by pointing out that such a city would be a prototype for an offworld city. Not that it should necessarily be a self contained monstrosity / joke, but something that starts to set up the infrastructure and maybe includes some geothermal carnot generators (what better way to take advantage of the perpetual winter outside than to make self-sustaining power by harnessing the power of the earth?
2. Scientific Exploration: Learning more about the universe around us will teach us more about our own world, ourselves, and our origins.
The inherant scientific value is irrefutable, but there is little real world application to this.
1. To provide the sense of progress which yields human happiness. No one likes stagnation. I can think of nothing more repulsive than the idea that in 200 years we could still be Earth-bound.
The dark ages were brought about because innovation stagnated. Everyone ran out of ideas and got so concerned with today that they stopped worrying about tomorrow. These days, we're perhaps on the brink of a newly perceived stagnation. We're masters of the air (airplanes), sea (gigantic boats and submarines) and land (earth destroying cranes, cars, trucks, trains, etc.). Microelectronics are banging against the Laws of Physics, with only nanotechnology seemingly a solution. In our daily lives, few people can think of a way to continue to innovate that makes a difference. Heck, most people don't want to upgrade their life centers (TVs) because the upgrades (HDTV) are too expensive despite how much better they are. Life changing innovation, the kinds of which impact "human happiness" are those leaps and bounds we've been hitting in the past century or two. You can't predict them, an
Sales for Lego have fallen over 25% in the last two years and the company is looking at a record setting loss for this year.
Oh, sorry, my bad. I stopped buying them when my wife got pregnant. I only intended to put them away until their choking risk lowered significantly, but that hasn't happened yet. So far the kid is cheaper than the Lego habit though.
Re:My favorite in game humor... Warcraft/Starcraft
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Everyone knows if you click the people in Warcraft/Starcraft enough, you get some funny jokes, but my favorite was in WC3
Does this not depend HOW you implement your selftimed logic? Do you, by any change, know how Philips did implement this?
There are several ways to implement self-timed logic in general and asynchronous architectures as well. I don't claim to know how Philips did this. My points were not meant to be insurmountable, just a statement about how one specific poster's ideas were difficult to implement and just the tip of the iceburg.
I was responding to my parent post, which stated:
If you wire an odd number of NOT gates in series, you end up with an oscillator whose period is twice the sum of the propagation delays of all the gates. If you replace one of the NOT gates with a NAND or NOR gate, then you can stop or start the oscillator at will. Furthermore, by extra-cunning use of NAND/NOR and EOR gates, you can lengthen or shorten the delay in steps of a few gates. Obviously at least one of the gates should have a Schmitt trigger input to keep the edges nice and sharp; but that's just details.
I don't think anybody in their right mind would implement an entire chip using this specific embodiment. I don't know, but I doubt Philips did either. My post was a discussion of this idea presented by its parent and should not be interpreted to have a bearing on what Philips is doing. There are a lot of ways to implement asynchronous processors.
My idea was to scatter a bunch of NOT gates throughout the core of a processor, so as to get a propagation delay through the chain that is just longer than the slowest bit of logic.
I assume that you hope to use your self timed logic (as it's known in the industry) to avoid all the problems associated with clocked logic and provide an easy to use asynchronous solution. Please do not forget manufacturing tolerances and that you have to make your self-timed logic 99.99999% certain slower than the slowest asynchronous path. This means that you have to qualify your entire logic library with a specific technology, then guardband it to make sure that when manufacturing shifts due to reasons you cannot explain, your chip still works. For this reason, in my experience, self timed logic has been slower than clocked logic for nominal cases and much slower in fast cases (in special cases, better than breaking even in slow process conditions).
Self-timed logic of the kind you describe would likely still end up with latches to capture the result / launch into the next self-timed logic block. In this case, you're still paying the latch cycle time penalty for clocking your pipeline. You're still burning the power associated with the clock tree (although you are gating your clocks to only the active logic, known as "clock gating", an accepted practice), and you're additionally burning the power for each oscillator, which I suggest would likely be more than the local clock buffers in a traditional centrally PLL clocked chip.
An ideal asynchronous chip would be able to not use latches to launch / capture and still be able to keep multiple instructions in flight -- using race conditions for good and not evil. This would involve a great deal of work beyond simply using inverters and schmitt triggers. This is a larger architecture question requiring a team of PhDs and people with equivalent professional experience.
NT 3.00+ (at least) came for i386[+], MIPS, PPC and Alpha. MIPS and PPC didn't have enough interested buyers to maintain the platform. Alpha held out a bit longer and actually had some followers. Microsoft wasn't stupid, they lost money on the platforms, saw no way to recover it and cancelled non x86 NT. Consider that Microsoft's Xbox2 developer systems are Macintosh G5s with customized NT kernels. It's not like that was hard.
According to rumor, the AIM alliance was formed because Motorola wanted to learn from IBM how to better serve Apple. Apple wanted to have a hand in their next architecture and wanted to get some of the performance from IBM. IBM, everybody understood, was going to take over the world with OS/2 beige boxen running PPC -- this plan changed to NT beige boxen running PPC. But in the 1992/1993 timeframe, when x86 was weakest (just before Pentium), even IBM couldn't muster the market to ditch backwards compatibility. The PowerPC 615 was behind schedule, power hungry and had some legal problems (fundamentally, I don't think it was strategic -- Apple learned how hard it was to get programmers to program native PPC code when they could stick with 68k and have it emulated well enough).
To answer your question: Nobody would buy PPC Windows, because they didn't. There's no backwards compatibility, no program base, and these days nobody actually knows what system they're running on anyway. If you want compute cycles, you either need an Athlon (faster than hell memory access), Itanic (faster than hell double precision float) or Power (8-32 CPUs in one system). If you want a Windows interface, you don't care what you have because the processor wastes too much time waiting for you.
Sequestering CO2 underground is tantamount to screwing our kids over -- again!
IINAG (Geologist). Where do you think the CO2 came from? By most accounts, our coal and petroleum is coming from plants that died long ago, thereby sequestering CO2. All this is doing is putting the CO2 back in the ground in a form that won't be usable again. This would be like growing a forest, cutting it all down and burying it under 10 feet of earth (before it breaks down much), then growing a new forest in its place.
I believe we need real solutions, like you say. Today, we're working on those. Wind power is good for when wind is strong, and there are some energy storage means that are old (flywheel) and new (hydrogen, either straight or in carbon chains) that will help. Wind power will be approximately equal to hydrocarbon based energy costs within a decade. We're already close. Solar may never get there, but it may be more efficient than using wind to store energy for peak daytime use. There are countless renewable "real solutions" (generating what you're using instead of cashing in jurassic solar power in the form of plants and animals) that will slowly become viable as petrochemicals increase in price.
We won't run out of oil tomorrow. Maybe next year it will be 5% more expensive to get to oil. That means that any renewable source that costs that much will suddenly take off to help alleviate the energy demand. Maybe 3 years from now, oil will again be 5% more expensive -- each time oil based solutions increase in costs, the barrier for renewable sources lowers.
We've used the savings account of energy for a century. We've cashed a bunch of stored energy in, squandered most of it, and learned enough so that when the accout is dry, we will have something to continue without it. Once I read biologists were making plastics with corn oil, I knew we could do anything if we had enough renewable energy.
For low-end applications, 32-bit doesn't make sense, especially if its going to add $1 to the cost of manufacture.
Of course you're right. However, when economies of scale make the bigger 32 bit processor cheaper than the smaller 8 bit processor, 32 bits may not be necessary but might make sense from a business perspective. And if that newly cheaper, overkill-class processor is far too powerful, perhaps you can get out of programming in assembly and start using a higher level language. Depending on what you're doing, that might reduce your time to market.
Back when Computer Shopper was basically 1000 pages of ads ("Yeah, honey, I buy this for the articles!" *chuckle*), you could see 386 processors costing more than 486s and even Pentiums simply because the market was so small. When you can no longer keeping an entire production line open, you have to re-open for small production runs, driving up costs.
Perhaps the 8 bit microcontroller will not forever be the obvious choice for your application. Heck, you may enjoy the extra elbow room too.
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Dear MPAA,
You can have my money when you earn it. Stop standing in the way of progress. I can now watch a movie from the comfort of my own home, without the sticky floors or 10 minutes of commercials preceeding it.
Current copyright lawsuits are not promoting the progress of science. Computers are here to stay, and innovators are enabling me to watch a movie after my toddler goes to bed. I'm willing to give someone money in exchange for this innovative convenience, but none of the copyright holders wants to take it.
I'd pay for commercial free TV episodes I could watch on my own schedule, too, if I didn't have to wait 5 years for the DVD to come out, but that's a topic for a different day. They think my eyeballs are worth money to advertisers, huh? Why won't they take it from me directly?
Consider it this way: The 8088 was a good decision for the IBM PC. It had the CISC mentality when the FSB was the same speed as the on chip clock. With 0 and later 1 level of metal, it had limited power, but it worked "well enough". Applications came out for this cheap computer, and it thrived. Since you discuss the "engineering point of view", I'll assume you know what happened in the following years.
1990. x86 was getting long in the tooth. 386 was a major thing, and 486 had some nice speed improvements, but little additional functionality. 68k was running out of gas, and everybody else's CISC was just clamoring for some freedom. This was the turning point, when anybody could have taken the lead. Intel, as we all know, wrapped a translator around a RISC core and made the HUGE (monstrous in size and power) 66MHz Pentium (those that failed speed sorting were sold at 60MHz). Everybody else -- Alpha, PowerPC, Sparc, PA-RISC and even ARM to a lesser degree -- had an opportunity, but Intel kept compatibility. Since then, Intel has been able to make slight improvements to the translator, add a few whistles (MMX, MMX2, SSE, SSE2) and rice out the RISC core to keep up. Today, compilers are a known constant. There may be some x86 hand tuning to do, but for the most part the basic x86 instruction set has done everything there is to do -- so Intel is free to hack up their translator and make the RISC core as fast as they can.
HP has all but put the last nail in the coffins for PA-RISC and Alpha, Fuji is starting to do something real with Sparc (forget Sun, they stopped really trying on the processor front 5 years ago). PowerPC is struggling with a lack of application support for either AIX or a low end home system. The MiniMac has a chance to increase PowerPC volumes, which may be the crowbar to increase application support on the consumer front.
The original AIM idea was that Motorola and Apple would continue what they had done with the Mac and IBM was going to take over the Intel world with PowerPC running PCs running OS/2 (later WinNT). Turns out, IBM isn't priced to take the cheap consumers and isn't glitzy enough to take the consumers with money to burn.
I use vim almost exclusively. Most people use either vim or elvis symlinked from vi and don't know it, although vi is its own program. I can come up with 26 letters [a-z], 10 numbers [0-9], shift (gotta hit that "!" you know), escape and colon. Then we can't forget / for the searches and replaces, \ to be able to match special characters, and newbies will want the arrow keys instead of h, j, k and i.
Your humor isn't lost on me, but a seasoned vi user will use at least 41 keys, 45 for the inexperienced. The other 8 must be for Emacs.
I had a summer job at Mervyn's 10+ years ago and the register had a keypad that matched the Bell layout. When the scanner wouldn't read a UPC code, I typed it without looking down. My hit ratio was higher because my eyes never left the number stream. Some customers didn't trust my number entry and insisted that I show them they were identical.
I'm getting tired of hearing non-USians complaining about being ignored. Are you telling me that you think the US government outlawing spam would have zero effect on worldwide spam? Or that if the governments of the world outlawed spam it would have no effect outside of America? For all I know, "felony" is a concept that holds worldwide meaning -- a crime for which there are serious penalties. For all I know, if all the first world nations declared spam a serious crime (everything from stealing bandwidth to fraud in headers), it would not only benefit America.
The Internet started in the US, with US tax dollars (military and later educational). Today, it's worldwide. Things that affect the Internet start everywhere -- including :insert your country name here:. Things you do affect us, and vice versa. If we all work together unilaterally, we all have a universal impact. Slashdot may lean towards the American side of things and post things during American time zones, but that's one website. You're welcome to frequent any website that caters to your needs (or complain when you're too lazy to do so, but I can complain about your complaints just as loudly).
To quote Colonel Potter, "HORSE HOCKEY". Stop wasting everybody's time justifying a price with features some of us don't care about.
I'm a Mac fan. Let me go on the record as saying that. If I want to compare prices between an entry Mac and a Shuttle, but I don't need an expensive OS, a DVD-ROM, Quicken, a paid for Office suite or any video editing suite, I can just walk down to Fry's Electronics, find a Shuttle I like and look up the price of a system that meets my needs. I don't need to add software just to compare, I'm a consumer! I can compare entry Mac against entry PC any way I want! If the Mac comes with stuff I don't need, it's wasted resource and there's no value. In economic circles, I'm paying the opportunity cost, but not getting the benefit -- a loss in economic efficiency.
Compare what you want with a Minimac. I'll compare the OS that I prefer (MacOS X) against my favorite PC OS (Debian unstable) on some low end hardware and you can bet I won't add in the software for the Shuttle that I don't care about. MacOSX plus my percieved quality of a Mac are alone worth doubling the cost to get up to $499 + the cost of enough memory to actually do something.
You're talking like the idiots who say the only way to compare the cost of a new Mac with a customizable video card (read as PowerMac G5) is to compare with a dual Xeon with XP Pro and all the wizbang whistles added on, when all I want is a nice single processor Athlon with a top of the line nVidia processor and a gig of RAM. If you're not using those features (I don't need wireless, I have CAT5e just fine and don't get me started on charging everybody for optical sound when so few of us care), leave them out! Don't be an idiot and start adding useless features to justify a purchase!
Add up the price of the features YOU WANT for each platform. Acknowledge any value increase the software or hardware of either platform in your features and prices, then make an educated decision. For me, a new Mac with OSX is worth far more than the $129 upgrade price Apple charges, and that goes into it. Style is worth something, too, but recent PCs have come part way. There aren't many PCs that are as beautiful and functionally aesthetic as the PowerMac G5, and that may be worth something too.
I'll probably be picking up a Minimac in a year with the VGA to S-Video adapter ($19) to be my home entertainment system. I don't care about Quicken, Office or video editing (for chrissake, who the hell has time for that crap?), I just want VLC and a Mac on my TV. Around that time, my 1GHz PowerBook G4 may also be due for an upgrade, and I'll take advantage of eBay and the value retention of the Mac -- another value add of the platform for me.
"My" first computer was a 286 with a 10 MB RLL hard drive. I actually improved my performance by running Stacker -- a hard drive doubling program. It did on the fly compression and decompression transparent to the applications. The fun part was that the puny CPU could uncompress a drive in less than 50% of the time it took to write it. Put another way, it took 100% (defined) to write a certain set of data, without compression. An average workload had 50% of the data to write after compression to the hard drive but it cost an extra 20-30% to generate the compressed data -- resulting in the remaining 20-30% being observed as increased drive performance.
I won't pretend to be an expert at digital photography. Some people can't handle even JPG compression, so they write raw files. From what I've read, those cameras are largely dominated by the write performance of the media (typically flash). If this is the case, it seems like interleaving the data (similar to RAID striping for you software guys) over multiple flash cards (or subarrays inside a high performance flash card) may be a possible way to go. On the other hand, if the workload can handle JPG compression, I would not accept it as assumed that the CPU can't be harnessed to increase write performance because of the decrease in time spent writing to slow media.
And I would expect if there's a market for $1000+ cameras for the pros that the camera vendors can find a CPU that's cheap enough to take advantage of any compression algorithm that generates better pictures and/or better performance.
Conventional wisdom tells us that hydrogen made everybody burn to death on the Hindenburg, and that's why it was a disaster. Actually, you're right in that the hydrogen burning wasn't the problem. Hydrogen is even better at floating than helium. Get a balloon with hydrogen in it and it'll float much quicker than helium -- and leak out much faster too. With the Hindenburg, the hydrogen fire was out very quickly. The gas went straight up, far from people, and burned itself out very quickly. Sure, the coating may have been a highly flammable acetate compound as you point out (this point is contested), but what if you have a bunch of people on an airship when the bouancy floats away? The airship falls. Interestingly enough, most of the casualties from the Hindenburg were people who fell to their deaths and there wasn't much time for jumping.
That's nice and all, but long ago Commander Taco told us that the comments only got ~5000 pageviews. Double that because time has passed. We know that the front page gets loaded a bunch more than that, maybe hundreds of times per day? Face it, toying with the comments page has no impact.
I've been looking at the Koolance kit lately. If it weren't for all the crap about the "Slashvertisement", I'd be able to see some interesting user reviews from my peers who actually bit the bullet. You know, people who didn't get a preview sample, motivated to give it a positive review so they continue to get free stuff -- real people who have no vested interest in the continued success or failure of the product.
A Slashvertisement may or may not be a real thing, but it gives us comment-dwellers a chance to discuss products we've seen in action and the rest a chance to read about their satisfaction. Additionally, college students are home for Christmas break. Slashops are getting fewer articles submitted, so we'll have some of the dregs for a few days. Deal with it. At least it's better than summer vacation.
My wife has a mind of her own. Let me tell you this: if she runs IE, it's not my fault. It's her computer. If I don't realize what she's doing, it's my fault for not invading her privacy and that's where that ends.
We have the presumption of innocence in the US, certainly. The police also have the burden of protecting the populace. They had a great big uncertainty cloud surrounding Mitnick -- they had no idea what he was capable of, or his real motivations. It's easy for those of us who have studied his case to understand how mistreated he was, but for the police who didn't know if he would be able to use the phone line and damage the general populace, this was a very simple decision.
The Bill of Rights says nothing about my one phone call. I think it would be very reasonable for the police to call a lawyer for someone whose phone skills are in question. Heck, maybe the police should just drive down to the address of that lawyer, or some other designate of the accused. Mitnick's case was filled with things that make it different from Joe Sixpack getting pulled over for DUI. It was a very non-standard crime with little prescedent. Stuff went wrong and part of it was the police acting to protect us from things that they didn't understand.
Real: Congrats on the reverse engineering. It's great when a product can be extended beyond the original intent and do more stuff or do the same stuff better. Additional file formats and additional services in the market are only a benefit for the consumer. Choice is good.
Apple: Congrats on the update, whether necessary or not, that bollocksed up the Real software. The Apple iPod experience involves a consistant interface and a consistant experience with iTunes that leads consumers to try out OSX. It's your software update, it's the consumer's choice to run it, just as it is the consumer's right to make a non-standard update and try out Real choices. Anything that Apple can do to improve their already great product is great for their present and future customers.
Everybody wins. Real gets some spare change and a little extra publicity. Apple gets a software update out there to help out their customers who seek additional support. If I can remind everybody, this software update actually includes stuff some people might want (hearing the click wheel through the headphones is a welcome feature in my mind). It is not Apple's responsibility to help Real out, and Real signed up for this arms race. I'm going to keep Real stuff off my iPod and enjoy the software updates... if I ever need to replace my original 5gig iPod that they're done releasing updates for.
I'm bad at meal planning. I'm bad at knowing what I've got. I've considered something like what this guy proposes -- basically a program that knows a bunch of healthy recipies and a TiVo like thumbs up / thumbs down for future reference system. Such a system could quickly learn what I like and don't and tell me what minimum foodstuffs to buy to make healthy meals for the next week.
The last time I was left to my own devices, I ate pasta, italian sausage and maranara sauce for 2 weeks straight. I broke the monotony with a single serving of Weight Watchers frozen pizza and then went back to the pasta. I like healthy foods, make no mistake. I just can't pick something out when I have to and will fall back on my favorites.
Automated systems can take all the joy out of life. But they can replace mundane parts of our lives that we don't manage well anyway and manage them better while leaving us time to do the things we want.
On a whim and out of curiousity, I once bought a half gallon of organic milk. Normally milk goes to waste in my fridge, going bad in 5 days while it would take me 7-8 to actually finish the smallest of containers. This organic milk, on the other hand, lasted the whole week it took to consume. Strange thing, I thought, must be something they add to the feed of conventionally fed cows. Then I found a cheaper organic milk, tried it out, and voila, it went bad after 5 days just like my ordinary conventional milk. When next in the store, I read the containers. All the milks were merely pasteurized except for my spontaneously bought organic milk -- which was ultra-pasteurized. My conclusion: If I don't have to buy two containers of milk per week, spending 25% more for organic ultra-pasteurized milk is saving me 75% on milk.
I have to look really hard to find ultra-pasteurized milk. I can't tell the difference, but I only like skim anyway (due to childhood lactose intolerance, I didn't really grow up accustomed to the taste of milk). I'm not convinced that ultra-pasteurization really means better, only that it's worth paying a premium for in order to save myself money.
So, let me see if I get this straight. The networks are going to stab each other in order to keep me roped in. They're going to end and begin shows so that, not only can I not manually change the channel at the right time, but not even my TiVo can keep up?
Gee, it's really too bad you can't download TV shows from the Internet from a legal provider that either charges per show or keeps commercials. It seems like I can either choose not to watch shows, choose to miss introductions and / or resolutions, or violate copyright and enjoy every show as it was written and performed in their entirety (after editing anyway).
I've got a friend who has 2 TiVos and a PVR from his cable company because the networks play this game. I do not consider that an option. Managing which one has which subscription is quite a chore. I'd much rather launch an AVI from a single directory.
That's great! Will he tell us why Dark Angel jumped the shark late in the first season?
The premise was good SciFi fare. Genetically enhanced superhumans using today's ultra-hip-lingo as if it would never go out of style. One of these, Max, is determined to find her brothers and sisters and not have a relationship to the handicapped guy to whom she is desperately attracted. Then Cameron had to introduce mutants that messed up all the "almost believable" part.
First off, I support space exploration. I was playing devil's advocate with my parent poster.
Secondly, I'll continue in that role to respond to you. You are implying that, merely because I stated space exploration may not be the right way to spend our resources that I am against all progress. Yet, you paraphrase me: "Why not invest incredible amounts of money in some targetted industries and in some "emerging" industries with higher financial risks / humanitarian rewards?". Just because I don't think making a space station whose sole purpose is to support astronauts that will babysit it full time is a good idea does not make me against progress. Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Marconi, Einstein, Bohr, Feymann, Curie, Watson, Franklin -- sure science is good. Man has come so far in understanding his world. Understanding the universe is a good idea too, but the US is not in a position to undertake a leadership role while provoking the rest of the planet. We understand so much, yet we act on so little. We should concentrate on industries that will generate near term benfits, AND spend some money on the "long shot" "emerging" technologies. The problem with using space vehicles as the tool for "emerging" technologies is the enormous cost associated with just sustaining the project before you can launch your first telescope that will explain weak forces.
I support space exploration; comparing the fantastic knowledge we're gaining from space these days to any number of prestigous predescessors on whose shoulders we now stand is a bit of a far fetch. The knowledge is great. It may some day have a practical application. Today, however, I believe we have geopolitical battles to fight and cannot responsibly continue with a space program for purely scientific reasons. Reconcile my support for a space program with my claim that it is irresponsible to undertake space exploration for scientific reasons in whatever political way you see fit.
Space exploration is cool. I support it. Please allow me to be a devil's advocate:
It seems to me that first world countries are having trouble keeping people procreating. The more advanced the society, the more rights the women, the better things the women have to do than sit at home and rear a half dozen to a dozen kids. Countries like Canada only grow because of immigration. Is it Taiwan that is trying to encourage procreation with subsidies?
NASA is, by every account, a grossly large organization with bureaucracy the likes of which no other entity in the world can hope to measure up to. They're too bureaucratic to save the Challenger. Why not invest incredible amounts of money in some targetted industries (A mach 10 aircraft has little real world application today) and in some "emerging" industries with higher financial risks / humanitarian rewards?
Most of the world ending scenarios seem to have other, potentially more beneficial solutions. Sure, leaving the world to go to the moon or someplace else may be a good way to spread the risk. It would be quite some time to set up the infrastructure to support a self sustaining populace that would not suffer from inbreeding. We may get to the point where this is possible, but NASA is not heading down a path to enable this. If there's a scenario that leads to a (nuclear or CO2) winter, why aren't we making subterrainian cities 10+ feet underground? I would expect one could even justify this by pointing out that such a city would be a prototype for an offworld city. Not that it should necessarily be a self contained monstrosity / joke, but something that starts to set up the infrastructure and maybe includes some geothermal carnot generators (what better way to take advantage of the perpetual winter outside than to make self-sustaining power by harnessing the power of the earth?
The inherant scientific value is irrefutable, but there is little real world application to this.
The dark ages were brought about because innovation stagnated. Everyone ran out of ideas and got so concerned with today that they stopped worrying about tomorrow. These days, we're perhaps on the brink of a newly perceived stagnation. We're masters of the air (airplanes), sea (gigantic boats and submarines) and land (earth destroying cranes, cars, trucks, trains, etc.). Microelectronics are banging against the Laws of Physics, with only nanotechnology seemingly a solution. In our daily lives, few people can think of a way to continue to innovate that makes a difference. Heck, most people don't want to upgrade their life centers (TVs) because the upgrades (HDTV) are too expensive despite how much better they are. Life changing innovation, the kinds of which impact "human happiness" are those leaps and bounds we've been hitting in the past century or two. You can't predict them, an
Oh, sorry, my bad. I stopped buying them when my wife got pregnant. I only intended to put them away until their choking risk lowered significantly, but that hasn't happened yet. So far the kid is cheaper than the Lego habit though.
"I love the dead. Frequently." -- WC3 Necromancer
There are several ways to implement self-timed logic in general and asynchronous architectures as well. I don't claim to know how Philips did this. My points were not meant to be insurmountable, just a statement about how one specific poster's ideas were difficult to implement and just the tip of the iceburg.
I was responding to my parent post, which stated:
I don't think anybody in their right mind would implement an entire chip using this specific embodiment. I don't know, but I doubt Philips did either. My post was a discussion of this idea presented by its parent and should not be interpreted to have a bearing on what Philips is doing. There are a lot of ways to implement asynchronous processors.
I assume that you hope to use your self timed logic (as it's known in the industry) to avoid all the problems associated with clocked logic and provide an easy to use asynchronous solution. Please do not forget manufacturing tolerances and that you have to make your self-timed logic 99.99999% certain slower than the slowest asynchronous path. This means that you have to qualify your entire logic library with a specific technology, then guardband it to make sure that when manufacturing shifts due to reasons you cannot explain, your chip still works. For this reason, in my experience, self timed logic has been slower than clocked logic for nominal cases and much slower in fast cases (in special cases, better than breaking even in slow process conditions).
Self-timed logic of the kind you describe would likely still end up with latches to capture the result / launch into the next self-timed logic block. In this case, you're still paying the latch cycle time penalty for clocking your pipeline. You're still burning the power associated with the clock tree (although you are gating your clocks to only the active logic, known as "clock gating", an accepted practice), and you're additionally burning the power for each oscillator, which I suggest would likely be more than the local clock buffers in a traditional centrally PLL clocked chip.
An ideal asynchronous chip would be able to not use latches to launch / capture and still be able to keep multiple instructions in flight -- using race conditions for good and not evil. This would involve a great deal of work beyond simply using inverters and schmitt triggers. This is a larger architecture question requiring a team of PhDs and people with equivalent professional experience.
NT 3.00+ (at least) came for i386[+], MIPS, PPC and Alpha. MIPS and PPC didn't have enough interested buyers to maintain the platform. Alpha held out a bit longer and actually had some followers. Microsoft wasn't stupid, they lost money on the platforms, saw no way to recover it and cancelled non x86 NT. Consider that Microsoft's Xbox2 developer systems are Macintosh G5s with customized NT kernels. It's not like that was hard.
According to rumor, the AIM alliance was formed because Motorola wanted to learn from IBM how to better serve Apple. Apple wanted to have a hand in their next architecture and wanted to get some of the performance from IBM. IBM, everybody understood, was going to take over the world with OS/2 beige boxen running PPC -- this plan changed to NT beige boxen running PPC. But in the 1992/1993 timeframe, when x86 was weakest (just before Pentium), even IBM couldn't muster the market to ditch backwards compatibility. The PowerPC 615 was behind schedule, power hungry and had some legal problems (fundamentally, I don't think it was strategic -- Apple learned how hard it was to get programmers to program native PPC code when they could stick with 68k and have it emulated well enough).
To answer your question: Nobody would buy PPC Windows, because they didn't. There's no backwards compatibility, no program base, and these days nobody actually knows what system they're running on anyway. If you want compute cycles, you either need an Athlon (faster than hell memory access), Itanic (faster than hell double precision float) or Power (8-32 CPUs in one system). If you want a Windows interface, you don't care what you have because the processor wastes too much time waiting for you.
IINAG (Geologist). Where do you think the CO2 came from? By most accounts, our coal and petroleum is coming from plants that died long ago, thereby sequestering CO2. All this is doing is putting the CO2 back in the ground in a form that won't be usable again. This would be like growing a forest, cutting it all down and burying it under 10 feet of earth (before it breaks down much), then growing a new forest in its place.
I believe we need real solutions, like you say. Today, we're working on those. Wind power is good for when wind is strong, and there are some energy storage means that are old (flywheel) and new (hydrogen, either straight or in carbon chains) that will help. Wind power will be approximately equal to hydrocarbon based energy costs within a decade. We're already close. Solar may never get there, but it may be more efficient than using wind to store energy for peak daytime use. There are countless renewable "real solutions" (generating what you're using instead of cashing in jurassic solar power in the form of plants and animals) that will slowly become viable as petrochemicals increase in price.
We won't run out of oil tomorrow. Maybe next year it will be 5% more expensive to get to oil. That means that any renewable source that costs that much will suddenly take off to help alleviate the energy demand. Maybe 3 years from now, oil will again be 5% more expensive -- each time oil based solutions increase in costs, the barrier for renewable sources lowers.
We've used the savings account of energy for a century. We've cashed a bunch of stored energy in, squandered most of it, and learned enough so that when the accout is dry, we will have something to continue without it. Once I read biologists were making plastics with corn oil, I knew we could do anything if we had enough renewable energy.
Of course you're right. However, when economies of scale make the bigger 32 bit processor cheaper than the smaller 8 bit processor, 32 bits may not be necessary but might make sense from a business perspective. And if that newly cheaper, overkill-class processor is far too powerful, perhaps you can get out of programming in assembly and start using a higher level language. Depending on what you're doing, that might reduce your time to market.
Back when Computer Shopper was basically 1000 pages of ads ("Yeah, honey, I buy this for the articles!" *chuckle*), you could see 386 processors costing more than 486s and even Pentiums simply because the market was so small. When you can no longer keeping an entire production line open, you have to re-open for small production runs, driving up costs.
Perhaps the 8 bit microcontroller will not forever be the obvious choice for your application. Heck, you may enjoy the extra elbow room too.