There are also clauses for experimental AIDS treatments, so patients don't have to wait for FDA approval. As long as the drug is considered safe by the authorities in that country, you should be able to legally import them for personal use. So basically, this squeezes US online pharmacies and gives the foreign ones a competitive edge. I understand the will to make sure these pharmacies aren't screwing up, but why require pharmacies to get licensed twice...if they have a storefront, they're being regulated by the state, and when they go online by the feds? What about conflicts between state and federal regulations? It just seems like a large burden to put over the heads of a lot of small businesses in this country.
You're right. From a functionality standpoint, Linux doesn't need much. In fact, for under $300, I put together a machine that does everything that I need that computer to do. No shrink wrap was involved at all. As far as the other points, these are things that will come with more users. What we really need from that perspective is a way to turn newbies into a massive beta test team (for our documentatio too...we need their feedback)
Linux does not exist in it's current capacity because a panel of market-heads decided it should blaze a trail to the desktop. Linux is an OS that a lot of us made for ourselves to suit our own ends. It is a matter of coincidence, not dertermination that Linux has reached a certain amount of success.
We should continue working on what we want to work on. Nobody wants to turn Linux into an OS they don't want to use. How long will we go down this path to the "desktop market" until Linux is reduced to something we wouldn't want to touch with a 10 foot pole?
I say we should make an OS for us, by us, and screw everybody else who doesn't like it. Freedom is the underlying principle of free software, and I don't neede a major distro company (with commercial interests) telling me what Linux is or should be. Let "Desktop Linux" be the first in a series of major forks from the tree...I'll keep my geeky distro.
There is one particular function that this product is especially suited for. Unfortunately, I see it as the only thing it can do that isn't being done better/cheaper some other way. This technology is a weapon of war. Ever since the airplane became a weapon of war, we've dropped leaflets on our enemies. Many people also remember the legendary "modem guy" who distributed modems to students and resistors in one of the early conflicts of this decade. Sounds practical to meld the two using this technology.
Each leaflet could contain messaging software that allows citizens to organize a resistance, upload intellegence or attack LANs to which it is attatched. Imagine the scope of the Human Intellegence effort you could launch against your foe if you gave 1,000,000 of these to their citizens.
No internet? No problem. Slap a flexible solar panel on the back, charge up capacitors, and communicate with satellites in bursts. It's mighty hard to track down the source of tiny transmissions in a broad and random storm.
Imagine 100,000 of your citizens using these against you during a war. Frightening. Not only will your enemy have extensive knowlege of your warfighting capability, but your enemy and citizens will know exactly where to strike where it hurts most.
Millions of these could be dropped by a plane over a large city in under a minute. People will pick them up and play with them. Especially geek types who are into technology, and might not care too much for the war their people are fighting. Being made of paper, there is a certain amount of "streamer" effect during descent, which could reduce impact velocity such that people don't get hurt and the device survives.
This technology seems especially suited to this application.
intelligence...how about warfare? You could drop thousands of these on a city from the back of a C-17. A satellite might be able to trigger and listen for RF from the device (solar panel on back that charges a bank of capacitors could provide power??). Each could connect to a web portal where civilians could organize, report enemy troop movements...etc. This is like "the modem guy" on a mass scale. Imagine being able to enlist an entire population in a HumInt operation against your foe for $5 a head. Sun Tzu would drool.
There are lots of embedded computing devices that run linux. Motoroloa even makes some that run LinuxPPC. The trick is to get embedded hardware that runs cool enough that you could enclose it in an element proof case. Think about those call boxes on the side of freeways. They protect equipment while allowing access for maintainance, and is a non-integral component, thus adding fault-tolerance to the system.
We should figure out ways to thwart such systems. As long as the technology exists, people are going to use it. complaining amongst ourselves is a waste of breath.
Maybe there's a kind of source attack for this thing. Pick apart it's pattern recognition mechanisms and use them against the technology. We can find ways to randomize our patterns such that it can't keep track of anything, or we can make it think that nothing's out of the ordianry.
Sure, we should be scared, pissed and protesting. We should also be working on "Plan B" in case this stuff does come into widespread use.
I wonder if I can see into somebody's house with this. I could use this to spy on all sorts of people. Maybe this will be a boon to the insulation industry, as couples start shielding their bedrooms, and stalking victims are forced to do their whole house.
There's no stopping off-duty cops from driving around your neighborhood in a caddilac either. "I just HAPPENED to notice..."
well...you've exposed my RELATIVE ignorance in the field, but I'm gald I evoked a more knowlegeble response than the one I could provide. Anyone who's taken a college astronomy course (my experience) knows pressure is important.
The big flaw that the original "CF" people enacted was going to the media before they went to peer review. Peer review exists for the benefit of us all. I've read about post fiasco CF experiments that have resulted in the deaths of researchers, because the pressures involved resulted in explosions. I'm not necessarily advocating CF as much as I'm saying that the claims (years after the original hooplah) of getting more energy out of a reaction (classic high school anode and cathode stuff) than you put into it (9v) sustained for a week or so invalidates the statement that hot is the ONLY way to go. Hec, we used to think fire came from the gods.
On Earth...you ASSUME this has to happen on earth. There have been plenty of hairbrained schemes about beaming energy back here via microwave. All I'm saying is:
IF: we haven't figured out how to get OUR methods of generating fusion to produce more sustainable energy than we put into it.
AND: we're always thinking of more ways to harness the fusion process of energy.
THEN: We shouldn't put most of our eggs in one basket and ASSUME hot is the ONLY way.
Paramout to this argument is that we don't know how to make fusion work as efficiently as our other means of getting more energy out of a system than we put into it for sustained periods. Our sun seems to have no problem doing this, even though we're too stupid to figure out how to replicate the process. Yes...we're stupid.
I think that the funding of fusion should be spread moreso into the fringe than is has been in the past, because the traditional way of thinking in both hot and "cold" fusion hasn't yeilded the results that physicists believe is possible, given evidence provided by the current perception of the cosmology.
You all should be glad that the pentagon is considering the moral and ethical implications of information warfare. What if they decided the other way. What if they said that morphing was good, that making the citizens riot and kill each other was the way to go. After all, Sun Tzu said that the enemy should already be defeated by the time you meet him on the field of battle (oxford translation). Coercing the citezens of a country to kill each other would be worse than the holocost, because more people would die, and in a more brutal fashion.
The fact that one of the world's most powerful military forces is thinking COMPASSIONATELY rather than strategically should make you all sleep easier. Criticising a person or body that's thinking in your best interest is one thing, doing so when you know very well that if they decided otherwise, you and the ones you care about could be burned alive or otherwise maimed is ludicrous.
I'm a United States Marine. I've been trained as to how disobeying the law of war makes the likelyhood of my dying on the field of battle greater, and likely more painful.
Get your heads out of the sand, the article is very positive if you think of the motives behind the findings.
Winning is good. When fighting monsters, however, you must be careful not to become one yourself.
You'd think that pysicists would think about how fusion happens in stars. Heat is incidental. Pressure is what makes atoms fuse. Hot fusion is a waste of energy. Sure, if you make atoms move around really fast, some of them will fuse. There are other ways to create pressure among atoms, and they take a lot less energy than a giant donut shaped oven.
Hey all. I'm one of the few who read the entirety of the "finding of fact." Based on this, and what else I know of transmeta, my conclusion is that this may be part of a bigger ploy to marginalize linux on x86 to M$'s benefit.
The way I heard the rumors, and through some intel gathering efforts by some 3rd parties, transmeta is working on a badass processor. It will run linux (why in hell else would torvalds be working at a semiconductor company, rather than a software company). This is fine and good for us all. Fast processors for a cool OS.
But wait...transmeta's bankrolled by one of the MS heavies...what would they have to gain by making hardware linux could run on (remember, they've put a lot of effort into being top dog on x86, why would they create another hardware platform, and invite others in)?
My hypothesis is this: Most Linux users use x86 because they originally had a windows machine, and installed linux on it. They may have bought more linux machines since. This is a weak point in the barrier to entry in the PC OS market. Because the new linux user doesn't have to buy new hardware to start using linux, it is a cheap and readly available alternative to windows on x86. If, to reap the full benefits of Linux, one had to either buy new hardware, or be content with relatively poor performance, the average windows user would be LESS likely to run linux, thus protecting the barrier to entry on the x86 OS market. If this new hardware would be incompatible with x86 hardware, businesses may be less likely to use it for their machines, because parts and support would be much more scarce and expensive than their x86 counterparts.
In short, I believe two things are possibly the REAL motive behind transmeta:
a) MS is tired of intel and wants more control over the CPU's windows runs on, and needs the OS of early adopters on board to help it take off.
-or-
b) Transmeta is a means by which MS can hurt Linux as a viable alternative to windows on x86, thus protecting the applications barrier to entry on that platform, protecting their monopoly.
I could easily write a script that would keep sending the same web form info over and over again. Maybe only until the next voter got into the booth, but I can take my time too.
If there ever is a voting client for ip, I hope it's made by uber-trustworthy NSA geniuses.
I look forward to making the machine think it's freezing outside, so I can get coke at cheap prices. all I need is a jet of expanding gas aimed towards the thermometer(s). Hairspray comes to mind.
CNN did this months ago, and the link was posted on/. Maybe there should be a URL matching tool for/. so that we don't get zombie posts (the keep rising from the dead, and picking at our brains).
1) Quicktime isn't a codec. Sorensen is a codec used in Quicktime. Learn more about digital media; you WILL be dealing with it in the future.
2) There are various Unix's already playing Quicktime content (Be does, and I know neXt did, I also wouldn't be surprised if IRIX has a player available too). I don't think that a port to linux would be a great ordeal. Especially since Apple is developing QT for their own BSD variant.
3) Apple, MS, and Real are in a fight to get the most client support. With the emergence of Linux as a Consumer OS will come serious Quicktime support. People don't watch movies on servers, they watch them on worstations. When Linux becomes a large consumer market, then you'll probably see Apple support QT for Linux.
In short. Don't bitch about lack of application support for Linux. Do something about it. Either code it yourself, or grow the installed consumer base so that developing consumer apps for it won't feel like a waste of time to software companies.
What with iMac DV and all, I think we're in for a whole lot more stuff like this. And DV is a whole lot better quality than a regular camcorder (component video vs crappy (s)vhs). So sit back...because everybody's movies will be taking up the bandwidth.
I'll take millions of years evolution over procedurally hacking individual genes based on a vague understanding of what's going on. Our genes are robust, dynamic systems of data. A deterministic approach of manipulating genes to enact specific results is doomed to monstrous failure.
"Sensitive dependence on initial condidtions" should be our phrase for the day. We're not dealing with an "if a, then b" situation. More like "if a, then 1/infinity variations" We just don't know what'll happen when we change a gene. They interact and influence each other so much that the results we get from one subject won't necessarialy be the same for another person. Or 10, 100, etc. In Baboons, the gene that dictates tooth size effects snout size, because the bone support needed by the tooth varies based on tooth size. Chimp DNA is >95% similar to human, but they look different. If we manipulated DNA to give people more muscle, then the cardiovascular and pulminary systems would have to adjust to support the additional tissue. I for one don't want to increase my child's risk of congential heart failure.
I'll be giving my children the benefit of millions of years or trial and error. There is just so much that we can never know, and I'm not going to bet anybody's life on re-sequencig DNA or starting from scratch.
At LinuxWorld San Jose, somebody was showing off quad G3 boards and was talking about G4 boards. Also, troll the mac rumor sites, as I saw a blurb on one of them a week or so ago about a company using IBM's open spec board to create some larger scale SMP boxes with the PPC G4.
...and I'm not telling. I think you all will thank me when they finally announce what they're up to. It's tremendously cool, and could be spoiled if anyone told.
That being said, I do think "I know what transmeta does" would be a great title for a sci-fi/horror flick. It just lends so much to the imagination.
And no, I will NOT answer any emails regarding the subject.
I remember when Apple's pro systems were $5,500. Apple cuts $2000 from their list price, and you make them out to be a bunch of greedy misers. As for building your own workstation using a souped up pentium pro with new marketing, or it's AMD clone. By the time you get the IRQ's and DMA's straight, and then find out that half of the HW doesn't have drivers for your OS, and make several trips to the computer store, I will have gotten actual work done with my G4. This is chiefly a multimedia/graphics workstation (SMP servers to follow). If we were bidding on the same job, I would have it done by the time you are able to print up a proposal. In other words...I'd get the job, and you'd eat the costs of your machine. Have fun living off of ramen, man.
There are some pretty vague and broad laws regarding computers and crime on the books in the US. If I remember my "Hacker Crackdown" (Sterling) correctly, title 18 of the United States Code has sections for this. One states that it is illegal to own or know how to own/operate a device which can be used to gain unauthorized access to a US gov interest computer. So, technically, since the government has computers on the web, it is illegal to own a computer which can connect to the internet. It is also illegal to KNOW how to use the internet.
It doesn't matter if what you're doing on the net is legal or not. The US Government can arrest you simply for knowing how to connect. Similar logic follows for the phone system. Since the government uses the public phone network, then the phone switches are government interest computers, and owning or knowing how to use a telephone is therefore illegal in the US.
I've never seen this enforced, but the law's on the books (section 1029, title 18 USC if I remember correctly). Code crypto all you want. If you are caught talking on a public phone, you can still be arrested.
Slashdot Mirror
There are also clauses for experimental AIDS treatments, so patients don't have to wait for FDA approval. As long as the drug is considered safe by the authorities in that country, you should be able to legally import them for personal use. So basically, this squeezes US online pharmacies and gives the foreign ones a competitive edge. I understand the will to make sure these pharmacies aren't screwing up, but why require pharmacies to get licensed twice...if they have a storefront, they're being regulated by the state, and when they go online by the feds? What about conflicts between state and federal regulations? It just seems like a large burden to put over the heads of a lot of small businesses in this country.
You're right. From a functionality standpoint, Linux doesn't need much. In fact, for under $300, I put together a machine that does everything that I need that computer to do. No shrink wrap was involved at all. As far as the other points, these are things that will come with more users. What we really need from that perspective is a way to turn newbies into a massive beta test team (for our documentatio too...we need their feedback)
Linux does not exist in it's current capacity because a panel of market-heads decided it should blaze a trail to the desktop. Linux is an OS that a lot of us made for ourselves to suit our own ends. It is a matter of coincidence, not dertermination that Linux has reached a certain amount of success.
We should continue working on what we want to work on. Nobody wants to turn Linux into an OS they don't want to use. How long will we go down this path to the "desktop market" until Linux is reduced to something we wouldn't want to touch with a 10 foot pole?
I say we should make an OS for us, by us, and screw everybody else who doesn't like it. Freedom is the underlying principle of free software, and I don't neede a major distro company (with commercial interests) telling me what Linux is or should be. Let "Desktop Linux" be the first in a series of major forks from the tree...I'll keep my geeky distro.
There is one particular function that this product is especially suited for. Unfortunately, I see it as the only thing it can do that isn't being done better/cheaper some other way. This technology is a weapon of war. Ever since the airplane became a weapon of war, we've dropped leaflets on our enemies. Many people also remember the legendary "modem guy" who distributed modems to students and resistors in one of the early conflicts of this decade. Sounds practical to meld the two using this technology.
Each leaflet could contain messaging software that allows citizens to organize a resistance, upload intellegence or attack LANs to which it is attatched. Imagine the scope of the Human Intellegence effort you could launch against your foe if you gave 1,000,000 of these to their citizens.
No internet? No problem. Slap a flexible solar panel on the back, charge up capacitors, and communicate with satellites in bursts. It's mighty hard to track down the source of tiny transmissions in a broad and random storm.
Imagine 100,000 of your citizens using these against you during a war. Frightening. Not only will your enemy have extensive knowlege of your warfighting capability, but your enemy and citizens will know exactly where to strike where it hurts most.
Millions of these could be dropped by a plane over a large city in under a minute. People will pick them up and play with them. Especially geek types who are into technology, and might not care too much for the war their people are fighting. Being made of paper, there is a certain amount of "streamer" effect during descent, which could reduce impact velocity such that people don't get hurt and the device survives.
This technology seems especially suited to this application.
intelligence...how about warfare? You could drop thousands of these on a city from the back of a C-17. A satellite might be able to trigger and listen for RF from the device (solar panel on back that charges a bank of capacitors could provide power??). Each could connect to a web portal where civilians could organize, report enemy troop movements...etc. This is like "the modem guy" on a mass scale. Imagine being able to enlist an entire population in a HumInt operation against your foe for $5 a head. Sun Tzu would drool.
There are lots of embedded computing devices that run linux. Motoroloa even makes some that run LinuxPPC. The trick is to get embedded hardware that runs cool enough that you could enclose it in an element proof case. Think about those call boxes on the side of freeways. They protect equipment while allowing access for maintainance, and is a non-integral component, thus adding fault-tolerance to the system.
We should figure out ways to thwart such systems. As long as the technology exists, people are going to use it. complaining amongst ourselves is a waste of breath.
Maybe there's a kind of source attack for this thing. Pick apart it's pattern recognition mechanisms and use them against the technology. We can find ways to randomize our patterns such that it can't keep track of anything, or we can make it think that nothing's out of the ordianry.
Sure, we should be scared, pissed and protesting. We should also be working on "Plan B" in case this stuff does come into widespread use.
I wonder if I can see into somebody's house with this. I could use this to spy on all sorts of people. Maybe this will be a boon to the insulation industry, as couples start shielding their bedrooms, and stalking victims are forced to do their whole house.
There's no stopping off-duty cops from driving around your neighborhood in a caddilac either. "I just HAPPENED to notice..."
well...you've exposed my RELATIVE ignorance in the field, but I'm gald I evoked a more knowlegeble response than the one I could provide. Anyone who's taken a college astronomy course (my experience) knows pressure is important.
The big flaw that the original "CF" people enacted was going to the media before they went to peer review. Peer review exists for the benefit of us all. I've read about post fiasco CF experiments that have resulted in the deaths of researchers, because the pressures involved resulted in explosions. I'm not necessarily advocating CF as much as I'm saying that the claims (years after the original hooplah) of getting more energy out of a reaction (classic high school anode and cathode stuff) than you put into it (9v) sustained for a week or so invalidates the statement that hot is the ONLY way to go. Hec, we used to think fire came from the gods.
On Earth...you ASSUME this has to happen on earth. There have been plenty of hairbrained schemes about beaming energy back here via microwave. All I'm saying is:
IF: we haven't figured out how to get OUR methods of generating fusion to produce more sustainable energy than we put into it.
AND: we're always thinking of more ways to harness the fusion process of energy.
THEN: We shouldn't put most of our eggs in one basket and ASSUME hot is the ONLY way.
Paramout to this argument is that we don't know how to make fusion work as efficiently as our other means of getting more energy out of a system than we put into it for sustained periods. Our sun seems to have no problem doing this, even though we're too stupid to figure out how to replicate the process. Yes...we're stupid.
I think that the funding of fusion should be spread moreso into the fringe than is has been in the past, because the traditional way of thinking in both hot and "cold" fusion hasn't yeilded the results that physicists believe is possible, given evidence provided by the current perception of the cosmology.
tack
DAMN!
You all should be glad that the pentagon is considering the moral and ethical implications of information warfare. What if they decided the other way. What if they said that morphing was good, that making the citizens riot and kill each other was the way to go. After all, Sun Tzu said that the enemy should already be defeated by the time you meet him on the field of battle (oxford translation). Coercing the citezens of a country to kill each other would be worse than the holocost, because more people would die, and in a more brutal fashion.
The fact that one of the world's most powerful military forces is thinking COMPASSIONATELY rather than strategically should make you all sleep easier. Criticising a person or body that's thinking in your best interest is one thing, doing so when you know very well that if they decided otherwise, you and the ones you care about could be burned alive or otherwise maimed is ludicrous.
I'm a United States Marine. I've been trained as to how disobeying the law of war makes the likelyhood of my dying on the field of battle greater, and likely more painful.
Get your heads out of the sand, the article is very positive if you think of the motives behind the findings.
Winning is good. When fighting monsters, however, you must be careful not to become one yourself.
tack
Man,
You'd think that pysicists would think about how fusion happens in stars. Heat is incidental. Pressure is what makes atoms fuse. Hot fusion is a waste of energy. Sure, if you make atoms move around really fast, some of them will fuse. There are other ways to create pressure among atoms, and they take a lot less energy than a giant donut shaped oven.
Hey all. I'm one of the few who read the entirety of the "finding of fact." Based on this, and what else I know of transmeta, my conclusion is that this may be part of a bigger ploy to marginalize linux on x86 to M$'s benefit.
The way I heard the rumors, and through some intel gathering efforts by some 3rd parties, transmeta is working on a badass processor. It will run linux (why in hell else would torvalds be working at a semiconductor company, rather than a software company). This is fine and good for us all. Fast processors for a cool OS.
But wait...transmeta's bankrolled by one of the MS heavies...what would they have to gain by making hardware linux could run on (remember, they've put a lot of effort into being top dog on x86, why would they create another hardware platform, and invite others in)?
My hypothesis is this: Most Linux users use x86 because they originally had a windows machine, and installed linux on it. They may have bought more linux machines since. This is a weak point in the barrier to entry in the PC OS market. Because the new linux user doesn't have to buy new hardware to start using linux, it is a cheap and readly available alternative to windows on x86. If, to reap the full benefits of Linux, one had to either buy new hardware, or be content with relatively poor performance, the average windows user would be LESS likely to run linux, thus protecting the barrier to entry on the x86 OS market. If this new hardware would be incompatible with x86 hardware, businesses may be less likely to use it for their machines, because parts and support would be much more scarce and expensive than their x86 counterparts.
In short, I believe two things are possibly the REAL motive behind transmeta:
a) MS is tired of intel and wants more control over the CPU's windows runs on, and needs the OS of early adopters on board to help it take off.
-or-
b) Transmeta is a means by which MS can hurt Linux as a viable alternative to windows on x86, thus protecting the applications barrier to entry on that platform, protecting their monopoly.
just some conjecture...make your own decision
dan
I could easily write a script that would keep sending the same web form info over and over again. Maybe only until the next voter got into the booth, but I can take my time too.
If there ever is a voting client for ip, I hope it's made by uber-trustworthy NSA geniuses.
dan
I look forward to making the machine think it's freezing outside, so I can get coke at cheap prices. all I need is a jet of expanding gas aimed towards the thermometer(s). Hairspray comes to mind.
CNN did this months ago, and the link was posted on /. Maybe there should be a URL matching tool for /. so that we don't get zombie posts (the keep rising from the dead, and picking at our brains).
1) Quicktime isn't a codec. Sorensen is a codec used in Quicktime. Learn more about digital media; you WILL be dealing with it in the future.
2) There are various Unix's already playing Quicktime content (Be does, and I know neXt did, I also wouldn't be surprised if IRIX has a player available too). I don't think that a port to linux would be a great ordeal. Especially since Apple is developing QT for their own BSD variant.
3) Apple, MS, and Real are in a fight to get the most client support. With the emergence of Linux as a Consumer OS will come serious Quicktime support. People don't watch movies on servers, they watch them on worstations. When Linux becomes a large consumer market, then you'll probably see Apple support QT for Linux.
In short. Don't bitch about lack of application support for Linux. Do something about it. Either code it yourself, or grow the installed consumer base so that developing consumer apps for it won't feel like a waste of time to software companies.
What with iMac DV and all, I think we're in for a whole lot more stuff like this. And DV is a whole lot better quality than a regular camcorder (component video vs crappy (s)vhs). So sit back...because everybody's movies will be taking up the bandwidth.
The old Apple would have taken 6 weeks to figure this out. Progress!
I'll take millions of years evolution over procedurally hacking individual genes based on a vague understanding of what's going on. Our genes are robust, dynamic systems of data. A deterministic approach of manipulating genes to enact specific results is doomed to monstrous failure.
"Sensitive dependence on initial condidtions" should be our phrase for the day. We're not dealing with an "if a, then b" situation. More like "if a, then 1/infinity variations" We just don't know what'll happen when we change a gene. They interact and influence each other so much that the results we get from one subject won't necessarialy be the same for another person. Or 10, 100, etc. In Baboons, the gene that dictates tooth size effects snout size, because the bone support needed by the tooth varies based on tooth size. Chimp DNA is >95% similar to human, but they look different. If we manipulated DNA to give people more muscle, then the cardiovascular and pulminary systems would have to adjust to support the additional tissue. I for one don't want to increase my child's risk of congential heart failure.
I'll be giving my children the benefit of millions of years or trial and error. There is just so much that we can never know, and I'm not going to bet anybody's life on re-sequencig DNA or starting from scratch.
At LinuxWorld San Jose, somebody was showing off quad G3 boards and was talking about G4 boards. Also, troll the mac rumor sites, as I saw a blurb on one of them a week or so ago about a company using IBM's open spec board to create some larger scale SMP boxes with the PPC G4.
...and I'm not telling. I think you all will thank me when they finally announce what they're up to. It's tremendously cool, and could be spoiled if anyone told.
That being said, I do think "I know what transmeta does" would be a great title for a sci-fi/horror flick. It just lends so much to the imagination.
And no, I will NOT answer any emails regarding the subject.
I remember when Apple's pro systems were $5,500. Apple cuts $2000 from their list price, and you make them out to be a bunch of greedy misers. As for building your own workstation using a souped up pentium pro with new marketing, or it's AMD clone. By the time you get the IRQ's and DMA's straight, and then find out that half of the HW doesn't have drivers for your OS, and make several trips to the computer store, I will have gotten actual work done with my G4. This is chiefly a multimedia/graphics workstation (SMP servers to follow). If we were bidding on the same job, I would have it done by the time you are able to print up a proposal. In other words...I'd get the job, and you'd eat the costs of your machine. Have fun living off of ramen, man.
There are some pretty vague and broad laws regarding computers and crime on the books in the US. If I remember my "Hacker Crackdown" (Sterling) correctly, title 18 of the United States Code has sections for this. One states that it is illegal to own or know how to own/operate a device which can be used to gain unauthorized access to a US gov interest computer. So, technically, since the government has computers on the web, it is illegal to own a computer which can connect to the internet. It is also illegal to KNOW how to use the internet.
It doesn't matter if what you're doing on the net is legal or not. The US Government can arrest you simply for knowing how to connect. Similar logic follows for the phone system. Since the government uses the public phone network, then the phone switches are government interest computers, and owning or knowing how to use a telephone is therefore illegal in the US.
I've never seen this enforced, but the law's on the books (section 1029, title 18 USC if I remember correctly). Code crypto all you want. If you are caught talking on a public phone, you can still be arrested.
Why on earth would you waste silicon translating CISC instructions to RISC instructions? Use that space for somethign valuable like cache.
are you really going to let a 20 dollar mouse stand in between you and 1 gigaflop per second?