In the sufficiently long run(barring state intervention in the market in their favor, which seems likely) even the rich humans could conceivably be doomed...
After all, an expert system programmed to have nothing but a tireless interest in fund management or whatever is going to be cheaper than a similar expert system plus an idle owner with a taste for suits and hookers and whatnot.
They'll be able to hold out a lot longer than the squalid proles; but there is no obvious reason why efficiency-oriented robots wouldn't eventually end up out-competing an essentially useless rentier class, since management machines wouldn't have appetites, hobbies, or other human expenses...
It is true that some areas of mathematics overlap pretty well with observation, and many of those areas had a body of math that(historically speaking) was definitely discovered empirically attached to them long before some more abstract axiomatic system special-cased them. We only have the historical record needed to prove it for some of the; but it seems overwhelmingly likely that people were using math well before they would have recognized the notion of "math", and limited capabilities for processing certain problems involving small integers seem to show up even in babies and other moderately bright animals.
In addition to Euclid, it seems highly likely that applied arithmetic substantially predates number theory, and it is definitely the case that people were putting up with the notion of a "limit" because it made physics work for rather an embarrassingly long time before somebody came up with a definition that didn't contain quite as much handwaving on the question of whether you were dividing by zero...
All of them, though, eventually were subsumed into much more abstract systems that happen to agree pretty well wit reality if you set certain parameters correctly; but encompass broad swaths of material that defies the imaginations of all but a select few, much less explanation by any by the loosest analogies to the material world.
While wikileaks certainly does have a few histrionic personalities, they have an additional expense: In the service of being "responsible" in shedding light on dark places, they do their own editorial work on material that comes to hand, so that "List of undercover informants working in $DUSTY_HELLHOLE" doesn't get the same release as "Redacted to avoid embarrassing $AGENCY".
If you just want to move leaked docs into public distribution like shit through a goose, that's a comparatively simple and cheap problem(with the only real difficulty being on the collection end). Shove it on bittorrent, possibly spiced with some porn so people will download and seed, and call it a day.
If you want to run an operation that seeks to maximize transparency, on the other hand, you have to assure would-be-whistleblowers and leakers that legitimate(or at least proximately legitimate: you might have issues with the CIA fucking around in hellhole X with complete lack of public oversight; but you probably don't want undercover agents X,Y, and Z getting their heads hacked off) secrecy will be preserved, while illegitimate secrecy-in-the-service-of-impunity will be lifted. That part gets slow and comparatively expensive...
Out of curiosity, are those insurmountable hardware differences, or some sort of EFI twiddling?
I remember that, back in the day, ibooks could only do display mirroring on the video-out port, while powerbooks could do dual-display, until somebody had a poke at the firmware and came up with a teeny little tweak that restored the locked capabilities of the (otherwise pretty much identical) hardware.
I did a little poking; but I'm still not wholly clear: is it correct to say that all "POWER" based systems(in reasonably current use) implement all the instructions and features needed to qualify as "PowerPC" systems; but that "PowerPC" devices lack some of the more advanced capabilities that the "POWER" devices possess?
You've got a fair point there. I have this horrible weakness for excessive parentheticals(that I sometimes forget to close). I think I managed to avoid nesting any this time; but they certainly aren't a good thing.
Unfortunately, negligent executives contain (on average, in rough figures) only about 40 liters of coolant each, with vigorous squeezing. Unless your organization is grotesquely over-managed, it is unlikely that you can solve the problem by those means alone...
It would be very interesting to see(aside from the practical challenges of finding people who know something about being an entrepreneur; but who aren't busy doing something and would be happy to teach high school, which would be the only way to avoid turning the "Entrepreneurship" classes into more or less formulaic 101-level small business accounting with a couple case studies... "Hey kids, we are going to teach you to be risk-taking individualists by grading your conformity and performance on several tests of accounting and business history trivia!") to what degree you could indeed teach the skills required.
Risk aversion, for instance, is a powerful driver of behavior, and varies greatly between individuals(with some research showing substantial variations in risk aversion about as early as you can get a neonate to meaningfully behave as though it is choosing between risk exploration and risk avoidance). It would be a fascinating to see the experiment tried; but I don't know of a society in history where more than a comparatively small percentage of people engaged in "Entrepreneurial" behavior, with the possible exceptions of populations that had undergone intense selection for such behaviors(eg. a pioneer or expat population composed of people who voluntarily left some position of relative stability to attempt to better themselves elsewhere). It would be cool to see it tried; but, if humans actually work that way in general, culture has done its level best to beat it out of them...
More specifically to the contemporary US, your post brings up the bogie man of healthcare accounting: Particularly if your record, or that of any dependents, is less than lily white, there is effectively a pretty massive incentive to become a cog in whatever machine will have you as fast as you possibly can. Depending on the precise nature of your health history and likely risks, the delta between having to self-insure and getting in as part of FooCorp or the Dept. of Bar group plan can be a veritable chasm. Unless you are a paragon of youth and health(in which case a relatively cheap high-deductable plan might work), there is, effectively, a very strong anti-startup, anti-small business incentive acting on you...
Take comfort in the fact that heavily centralized complex systems are extremely intrinsically stable, particularly if poorly understood and subject to multiple chaotic inputs, and aren't vulnerable at all to any sort of cascading failures...
I suspect that not going to college would be a fair bit more popular if the rewards of doing so seemed less grim. With the exception of the occasional "Genius says he is too cool for Harvard, drops out and makes bank" story(or the about-as-representative-but-more-downmarket musical and sports stars) human interest stories, the overwhelming narrative(buttressed by a very real drain on the US blue-collar workforce's prospects) is that everybody either goes to college or ends up asking if you would like fries with that... Not a hard decision.
Then it turns out(because education did not, in fact, unlock the magic post-industrial-not-shitty-service-jobs fairy) you can get a degree and end up asking if you would like fries with that. Shockingly, the "Job losses are good; because they mean efficiency, and you can just Gain Skills and get a cooler job!" race makes everybody run faster; but it is a lot less even on delivering the goods.
It is undeniably the case that education is questionably allocated; but it only strikes people as some sort of apocalyptic issue because degreed suckers are running smack into the fact that lower-skill jobs that don't suck horribly are draining away faster than those hip "knowledge worker" jobs are coming into existence, and the ones that do exist tend to require pretty specialized training indeed...
Given that, it is almost certainly the case that many people would be better off if they simply gave up, and got a shitty job with no student debt, rather than student debt and a shitty job; but that strategy runs directly counter to the (at one point actually empirically plausible) narrative of upward mobility...
I have relatively little interest in the question of what Dr. Paul may or may not be doing personally; but that is sort of the whole point of paying politicians a salary.
On the minus side, you do run into situations where City Counselor McSleazy passes an obscure bill such that the clock for his retirement started when he worked as a volunteer at the library one summer back in high school, leaving him to retire at 40.
On the plus side, if being a politician actually pays in vagely the same bracket as other jobs requiring similar qualfiications, you don't have a class of "representatives" that is 100% either bought-and-paid for because they couldn't afford it otherwise, or economic gentry who can afford to retire from day to day work in order to focus legislating in the favor of the local gentry.
That's why, historically speaking, legislative salaries have been something of a contested issue between the proponents of approximately egalitarian democracy, and the proponents of limited-sufferage democratic aristocracy. Career politicians generally leave a slime trail, and it is hard to like them as a class; but if you can't can't earn wages as a legislator, you can be pretty much assured that legislating will be done entirely by people who have other ways of obtaining support...
On the one hand, it is not at all difficult to see the unintended consequences(or, in some cases, quietly intended consequences) of federal student loans being so widely available.
The overtly scammy private colleges(you see ads for them plastered on subway cars, among other places) that make grandiose and generally overblown claims about their "career placement" abilities and rates, are one major beneficiary of this unintended(for them) subsidy. The rate at which first-gen-to-college easy marks get played for a few semesters and then dumped without measureable increase in anything other than debt is alaring. The more traditionally respectable colleges are less overtly evil(since they can, if you play your cards right, actually offer an excellent education, and they generally avoid stooping to any explicit claims about economic advancement, in favor of letting broad cultural messages about how people without college degrees are all kinds of fucked do the job for them); but federal loan system gives them a downright beautiful price-discrimination mechanism: Just set the "price" to $$$$$, and then Oh-so-kindly reduce it to more or less exactly what they think you are capable of paying(as proven by the various documents-upon-which-perjury-is-a-bad-plan that your FAFSA will refer to). Clever, that. One also cannot refrain from speculation as to the role of our oh-so-saintly financial services sector in the creation of yet another class of debt(conveniently government backed, and non-dischargeable in bankrupcy!) to play their games with...
On the other, though, I think that he is out to lunch. The real wages to relatively unskilled workers(ie. the sort of job you are likely to be working while shooting for a college degree, not the sorts of jobs that you can get after you have one, or the sorts of jobs that require reasonably prolonged job experience('upper-blue-collar' apprentice-track stuff, say, whic can actually pay pretty well; but is not clearly compatible with the trajectory of people working themselves through college) have been treading water, or worse, for something like four decades now. The real wages and job prospects of college graduates also haven't been doing so hot(though better than those of non-graduates). Unless the magic invisible hand fairy has a plan for dealing with the unimpressive and declining availability and financial returns on basically all middle class activity, We Have A Broader Problem. Never mind, of course, that some of the purported economic gains to a college education are likely artefacts produced by the signalling function of graduating(ie, Person X can follow instructions, Person X is not a total fuckup, Person X can work with others if necessary, Person X has an IQ higher than his shoe size), rather than by intrinsic improvements provided by education.
Federal loans have certainly increased the speed at which college is able to get expensive(just as the real-estate bubble increased the speed at which McMansionites were able to pretend that their tenuous grip on affluence wasn't slipping away before their eyes); but it isn't as though that occurred in isolation. Even with the cash available, taking on a huge stack of debt and cracking books for 4 years would be a lot less popular if there weren't such a strong impression that not doing so was a one-way ticket to ditch-digger class...
Environmental regulation is a favorite whipping boy of the "pro-business" crowd; but how can slashing restrictions on my ability to impose externalities by chemical means(some irksome, some lethal) on you in the pursuit of profit possibly be justified either ethically or from a 'sanctity of private property' stance?
Other than being done by respectable guys in suits, rather than unlikeable scum, polluting for profit is the approximate ethical and economic equivalent of picking pockets for profit: somebody ends up with a tidy black balance sheet to show for it; but they leave a whole lot of people in the red, without even the pretense of their consent.
It's their bafflingly unwavering support for such policies that makes me suspect most "libertarians" of being nothing more than corporatist shills. Step one to defending "Life, Liberty, and Property" is not, in fact, giving others the right to emit whatever exotic nasties they find profitable to dispose of into your body and/or property...
There may well be some nostalgia-gouging going on; but low-volume PPC boards fast enough to not be a complete joke on the desktop are likely just not that cheap.
Looking at the Applied Micro parts that prior Hyperion-supported PPC boards have used, their own dev boards(hopelessly ill-suited to desktop work, for want of RAM and a video controller; but with JTAG and suchlike dev goodies) seem to run ~$1,000 in quantities of one, even for the ones with relatively weak CPUs(the 333-800MHz single core stuff).
I can't find the eval kits for the newer single or dual core 1GHz-1.5GHz CPUs, but distributor prices for those(with a minimum order 120 units) seem to be ~$110 for the bare CPU.
Given that, I suspect that the margins probably aren't zero by any means; but that the business of building PPC desktop boards is just expensive, and will remain so unless the market magically expands.
Now, given the power efficiency and interesting feature set for certain flavors of embedded packet-slinging, the CPU might be competitively priced for what it is; but as a desktop processor, let's just say that it wouldn't want to meet an i3 or a Phenom in a dark alley, much less a $1k PC build... Not a huge surprise, I suppose. Apple stopped caring about desktop PPCs in 2006, which both suggests that the sector was already troubled 5 years ago, and means that there have been only a tiny number of niche customers, certainly not enough to drive new designs oriented in that direction, for the last five years...
Its an unfortunate historical quirk, for Amiga enthusiasts, that PPC is the architecture they are tied to, while ARM is the one that is really getting much more promising for non-x86 desktop/laptop/etc. applications. Anybody know why PPC seems to have retreated and ARM to have advanced?
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In the sufficiently long run(barring state intervention in the market in their favor, which seems likely) even the rich humans could conceivably be doomed...
After all, an expert system programmed to have nothing but a tireless interest in fund management or whatever is going to be cheaper than a similar expert system plus an idle owner with a taste for suits and hookers and whatnot.
They'll be able to hold out a lot longer than the squalid proles; but there is no obvious reason why efficiency-oriented robots wouldn't eventually end up out-competing an essentially useless rentier class, since management machines wouldn't have appetites, hobbies, or other human expenses...
What a sensible idea.(Incidentally, males aren't strictly carriers; but penile cancer is much less common than cervical for some reason)
It is my understanding that the rules of racist jokes allow you to make an unlimited number about your own race.
I assure you that I am more than adequately ill-melanized to make all the white-guy jokes I wish.
It is true that some areas of mathematics overlap pretty well with observation, and many of those areas had a body of math that(historically speaking) was definitely discovered empirically attached to them long before some more abstract axiomatic system special-cased them. We only have the historical record needed to prove it for some of the; but it seems overwhelmingly likely that people were using math well before they would have recognized the notion of "math", and limited capabilities for processing certain problems involving small integers seem to show up even in babies and other moderately bright animals.
In addition to Euclid, it seems highly likely that applied arithmetic substantially predates number theory, and it is definitely the case that people were putting up with the notion of a "limit" because it made physics work for rather an embarrassingly long time before somebody came up with a definition that didn't contain quite as much handwaving on the question of whether you were dividing by zero...
All of them, though, eventually were subsumed into much more abstract systems that happen to agree pretty well wit reality if you set certain parameters correctly; but encompass broad swaths of material that defies the imaginations of all but a select few, much less explanation by any by the loosest analogies to the material world.
Arguably math consists of both invention and discovery:
You invent the axioms; but you then discover the necessary implications of those axioms.
Discover, v., "To visit while white."
A man's flesh is his own. His water belongs to the shareholders?
Didn't some slashdotter confess to having developed UV-vision bee powers not too long ago?
Have we ruled out the possibility that he is systematically eradicating the non-aligned colonies in order to cement his grip on power?
While wikileaks certainly does have a few histrionic personalities, they have an additional expense: In the service of being "responsible" in shedding light on dark places, they do their own editorial work on material that comes to hand, so that "List of undercover informants working in $DUSTY_HELLHOLE" doesn't get the same release as "Redacted to avoid embarrassing $AGENCY".
If you just want to move leaked docs into public distribution like shit through a goose, that's a comparatively simple and cheap problem(with the only real difficulty being on the collection end). Shove it on bittorrent, possibly spiced with some porn so people will download and seed, and call it a day.
If you want to run an operation that seeks to maximize transparency, on the other hand, you have to assure would-be-whistleblowers and leakers that legitimate(or at least proximately legitimate: you might have issues with the CIA fucking around in hellhole X with complete lack of public oversight; but you probably don't want undercover agents X,Y, and Z getting their heads hacked off) secrecy will be preserved, while illegitimate secrecy-in-the-service-of-impunity will be lifted. That part gets slow and comparatively expensive...
Out of curiosity, are those insurmountable hardware differences, or some sort of EFI twiddling?
I remember that, back in the day, ibooks could only do display mirroring on the video-out port, while powerbooks could do dual-display, until somebody had a poke at the firmware and came up with a teeny little tweak that restored the locked capabilities of the (otherwise pretty much identical) hardware.
I did a little poking; but I'm still not wholly clear: is it correct to say that all "POWER" based systems(in reasonably current use) implement all the instructions and features needed to qualify as "PowerPC" systems; but that "PowerPC" devices lack some of the more advanced capabilities that the "POWER" devices possess?
You've got a fair point there. I have this horrible weakness for excessive parentheticals(that I sometimes forget to close). I think I managed to avoid nesting any this time; but they certainly aren't a good thing.
Unfortunately, negligent executives contain (on average, in rough figures) only about 40 liters of coolant each, with vigorous squeezing. Unless your organization is grotesquely over-managed, it is unlikely that you can solve the problem by those means alone...
The term "Workgroup" was hunted to extinction about 18 months ago by the term "Enterprise Cloud", unfortunately...
I'm pretty sure that even in Windows, neither AD binding nor Exchange 2010-compatible MAPI communication are kernel functions...
It would be very interesting to see(aside from the practical challenges of finding people who know something about being an entrepreneur; but who aren't busy doing something and would be happy to teach high school, which would be the only way to avoid turning the "Entrepreneurship" classes into more or less formulaic 101-level small business accounting with a couple case studies... "Hey kids, we are going to teach you to be risk-taking individualists by grading your conformity and performance on several tests of accounting and business history trivia!") to what degree you could indeed teach the skills required.
Risk aversion, for instance, is a powerful driver of behavior, and varies greatly between individuals(with some research showing substantial variations in risk aversion about as early as you can get a neonate to meaningfully behave as though it is choosing between risk exploration and risk avoidance). It would be a fascinating to see the experiment tried; but I don't know of a society in history where more than a comparatively small percentage of people engaged in "Entrepreneurial" behavior, with the possible exceptions of populations that had undergone intense selection for such behaviors(eg. a pioneer or expat population composed of people who voluntarily left some position of relative stability to attempt to better themselves elsewhere). It would be cool to see it tried; but, if humans actually work that way in general, culture has done its level best to beat it out of them...
More specifically to the contemporary US, your post brings up the bogie man of healthcare accounting: Particularly if your record, or that of any dependents, is less than lily white, there is effectively a pretty massive incentive to become a cog in whatever machine will have you as fast as you possibly can. Depending on the precise nature of your health history and likely risks, the delta between having to self-insure and getting in as part of FooCorp or the Dept. of Bar group plan can be a veritable chasm. Unless you are a paragon of youth and health(in which case a relatively cheap high-deductable plan might work), there is, effectively, a very strong anti-startup, anti-small business incentive acting on you...
I'll have to lay the sarcasm a bit thicker next time...
Take comfort in the fact that heavily centralized complex systems are extremely intrinsically stable, particularly if poorly understood and subject to multiple chaotic inputs, and aren't vulnerable at all to any sort of cascading failures...
I suspect that not going to college would be a fair bit more popular if the rewards of doing so seemed less grim. With the exception of the occasional "Genius says he is too cool for Harvard, drops out and makes bank" story(or the about-as-representative-but-more-downmarket musical and sports stars) human interest stories, the overwhelming narrative(buttressed by a very real drain on the US blue-collar workforce's prospects) is that everybody either goes to college or ends up asking if you would like fries with that... Not a hard decision.
Then it turns out(because education did not, in fact, unlock the magic post-industrial-not-shitty-service-jobs fairy) you can get a degree and end up asking if you would like fries with that. Shockingly, the "Job losses are good; because they mean efficiency, and you can just Gain Skills and get a cooler job!" race makes everybody run faster; but it is a lot less even on delivering the goods.
It is undeniably the case that education is questionably allocated; but it only strikes people as some sort of apocalyptic issue because degreed suckers are running smack into the fact that lower-skill jobs that don't suck horribly are draining away faster than those hip "knowledge worker" jobs are coming into existence, and the ones that do exist tend to require pretty specialized training indeed...
Given that, it is almost certainly the case that many people would be better off if they simply gave up, and got a shitty job with no student debt, rather than student debt and a shitty job; but that strategy runs directly counter to the (at one point actually empirically plausible) narrative of upward mobility...
Given that the financial blockade was well in place before that release, the chronology of your account seems more than a trifle suspect...
I have relatively little interest in the question of what Dr. Paul may or may not be doing personally; but that is sort of the whole point of paying politicians a salary.
On the minus side, you do run into situations where City Counselor McSleazy passes an obscure bill such that the clock for his retirement started when he worked as a volunteer at the library one summer back in high school, leaving him to retire at 40.
On the plus side, if being a politician actually pays in vagely the same bracket as other jobs requiring similar qualfiications, you don't have a class of "representatives" that is 100% either bought-and-paid for because they couldn't afford it otherwise, or economic gentry who can afford to retire from day to day work in order to focus legislating in the favor of the local gentry.
That's why, historically speaking, legislative salaries have been something of a contested issue between the proponents of approximately egalitarian democracy, and the proponents of limited-sufferage democratic aristocracy. Career politicians generally leave a slime trail, and it is hard to like them as a class; but if you can't can't earn wages as a legislator, you can be pretty much assured that legislating will be done entirely by people who have other ways of obtaining support...
Because it isn't socialism if some well-placed private sector actors benefit!
On the one hand, it is not at all difficult to see the unintended consequences(or, in some cases, quietly intended consequences) of federal student loans being so widely available.
The overtly scammy private colleges(you see ads for them plastered on subway cars, among other places) that make grandiose and generally overblown claims about their "career placement" abilities and rates, are one major beneficiary of this unintended(for them) subsidy. The rate at which first-gen-to-college easy marks get played for a few semesters and then dumped without measureable increase in anything other than debt is alaring. The more traditionally respectable colleges are less overtly evil(since they can, if you play your cards right, actually offer an excellent education, and they generally avoid stooping to any explicit claims about economic advancement, in favor of letting broad cultural messages about how people without college degrees are all kinds of fucked do the job for them); but federal loan system gives them a downright beautiful price-discrimination mechanism: Just set the "price" to $$$$$, and then Oh-so-kindly reduce it to more or less exactly what they think you are capable of paying(as proven by the various documents-upon-which-perjury-is-a-bad-plan that your FAFSA will refer to). Clever, that. One also cannot refrain from speculation as to the role of our oh-so-saintly financial services sector in the creation of yet another class of debt(conveniently government backed, and non-dischargeable in bankrupcy!) to play their games with...
On the other, though, I think that he is out to lunch. The real wages to relatively unskilled workers(ie. the sort of job you are likely to be working while shooting for a college degree, not the sorts of jobs that you can get after you have one, or the sorts of jobs that require reasonably prolonged job experience('upper-blue-collar' apprentice-track stuff, say, whic can actually pay pretty well; but is not clearly compatible with the trajectory of people working themselves through college) have been treading water, or worse, for something like four decades now. The real wages and job prospects of college graduates also haven't been doing so hot(though better than those of non-graduates). Unless the magic invisible hand fairy has a plan for dealing with the unimpressive and declining availability and financial returns on basically all middle class activity, We Have A Broader Problem. Never mind, of course, that some of the purported economic gains to a college education are likely artefacts produced by the signalling function of graduating(ie, Person X can follow instructions, Person X is not a total fuckup, Person X can work with others if necessary, Person X has an IQ higher than his shoe size), rather than by intrinsic improvements provided by education.
Federal loans have certainly increased the speed at which college is able to get expensive(just as the real-estate bubble increased the speed at which McMansionites were able to pretend that their tenuous grip on affluence wasn't slipping away before their eyes); but it isn't as though that occurred in isolation. Even with the cash available, taking on a huge stack of debt and cracking books for 4 years would be a lot less popular if there weren't such a strong impression that not doing so was a one-way ticket to ditch-digger class...
Environmental regulation is a favorite whipping boy of the "pro-business" crowd; but how can slashing restrictions on my ability to impose externalities by chemical means(some irksome, some lethal) on you in the pursuit of profit possibly be justified either ethically or from a 'sanctity of private property' stance?
Other than being done by respectable guys in suits, rather than unlikeable scum, polluting for profit is the approximate ethical and economic equivalent of picking pockets for profit: somebody ends up with a tidy black balance sheet to show for it; but they leave a whole lot of people in the red, without even the pretense of their consent.
It's their bafflingly unwavering support for such policies that makes me suspect most "libertarians" of being nothing more than corporatist shills. Step one to defending "Life, Liberty, and Property" is not, in fact, giving others the right to emit whatever exotic nasties they find profitable to dispose of into your body and/or property...
There may well be some nostalgia-gouging going on; but low-volume PPC boards fast enough to not be a complete joke on the desktop are likely just not that cheap.
Looking at the Applied Micro parts that prior Hyperion-supported PPC boards have used, their own dev boards(hopelessly ill-suited to desktop work, for want of RAM and a video controller; but with JTAG and suchlike dev goodies) seem to run ~$1,000 in quantities of one, even for the ones with relatively weak CPUs(the 333-800MHz single core stuff).
I can't find the eval kits for the newer single or dual core 1GHz-1.5GHz CPUs, but distributor prices for those(with a minimum order 120 units) seem to be ~$110 for the bare CPU.
Given that, I suspect that the margins probably aren't zero by any means; but that the business of building PPC desktop boards is just expensive, and will remain so unless the market magically expands. Now, given the power efficiency and interesting feature set for certain flavors of embedded packet-slinging, the CPU might be competitively priced for what it is; but as a desktop processor, let's just say that it wouldn't want to meet an i3 or a Phenom in a dark alley, much less a $1k PC build... Not a huge surprise, I suppose. Apple stopped caring about desktop PPCs in 2006, which both suggests that the sector was already troubled 5 years ago, and means that there have been only a tiny number of niche customers, certainly not enough to drive new designs oriented in that direction, for the last five years...
Its an unfortunate historical quirk, for Amiga enthusiasts, that PPC is the architecture they are tied to, while ARM is the one that is really getting much more promising for non-x86 desktop/laptop/etc. applications. Anybody know why PPC seems to have retreated and ARM to have advanced?