In those parts where people live relatively well the gap between the richest and everyone else is going up not down.
While that should be addressed, the "gap" is not an absolute thing. The rich can get richer, without making the poor any poorer.
In fact, technology is making the poor richer. Goods and services are getting dramatically cheaper. Someone in the middle class could live for YEARS off what they earn in one year, if they tried to do so. Instead, people tend to spend all the money they earn, on the most expensive luxuries they can afford, but that doesn't negate the point.
The exceptions seem to be a few things like land in the most desirable areas.
One obvious thing would be "food". We already struggle to grown enough food (and food of the right sorts and in the right places) to feed everyone alive today
No truth to that at all. We grow more than enough food for everyone on the planet:
Thank goodness then there's an unlimited amount of both air and water on this planet and that it's not being constantly polluted or ruthlessly exploited.
There *IS* an effectively unlimited amount of water on the planet. To be exact: 1,409,560,910 cubic kilometers.
Air pollution is not even a problem, if you've got free energy... You can filter out ANY pollutants with the proper scrubbers.
the more likely scenario is collapse due to over population and limited resources.
There's ample space across the surface of the earth for several orders of magnitude more people, without resorting to even basic technology like high-rises, let alone exotic technology like landfill in the oceans, space stations, etc.
And just what resources are "limited"? With enough energy you can extract the carbons from the air to make more oil from scratch, pull trace elements of anything out of seawater, etc. And with cheap energy it's a no-brainer to start mining the moon, Mars, or asteroids for anything we'd want.
This *IS* reality. The build-out of wind turbines and solar power plants, means there will soon be peaks of excessive FREE (or NEGATIVE priced) energy from time to time.
When those events become common enough (to ensure quick returns on the up-front capital investment), any energy-intensive processes that can be "batch" processed, become practical and maybe even profitable. Desalination and pumping water uphill are great candidates, as they can variably supplement other water sources without disruption, and can be more efficient than electrolysis of water into hydrogen.
If you're buying an Audi or a BMW, the price of replacing a headlight is not something that's going to concern you...
And the up-front price is very misleading... While a basic halogen headlight may only cost around $10, it uses 8X more electricity than an equivalent LED, and only lasts perhaps 1/10th as long. So you'll save money with LEDs from not having to replace them as often, not to mention the benefit of never having your lights burn out for the lifetime of the car. But the real savings comes from using 1/8th as much electricity... The conversion losses from gasoline to kinetic, then to electricity are huge, and the electricity savings from switching to LEDs will noticably affect your gas mileage on any reasoably fuel efficient vehicle.
I'm always amazed when I find dirt cheap devices running Linux, like my $30 D-Link router capable of DD-WRT with USB. no-name 24-port enterprise switches, or $40 DVD players with Divx and USB support.
Under what circumstances will the full $10,000 reward be offered?
I have a powerful laser, and I know where to find a large supply of homeless people (who wouldn't mind a few months in jail if they got a $2,000 check at the end of it).
Sure, you can't repeat this trick in the same area, with the same witnesses, but with a big enough payoff it would be a worthwhile business venture.
I can only assume that all people who support this argument run GNU Hurd, as it's a microkernel, instead of that 16,000,000+ line of code "monolithic megamonster" known as the Linux kernel.
Just because you can point to one microkernel that doesn't really work, and one monolithic kernel that does, will not invalidate the perfectly valid points made about the benefits of modularization. Yours is just a logical fallacy:
eg. "I'm sure everybody that likes bicycles never drives a car..."
When there's an outright rebellion, and yet you chose to proceed, that's not what I'd call "listening"... A few individuals may be hearing the complaints, but unless those in charge are responsive to them, it will never qualify as "listening". Crapping on your customer more slowly (and randomly) is still crapping on your customers. Until you've fixed ALL the problems you know about, there's no point in inflicting it those known issues upon more unwilling victims.
I believe the mobile site, and the beta site are wothless lost causes, and they need a complete rethink and redesign. By trying to "fix" them, you're throwing away more money and time. When a hole gets big enough, people get trapped by it,. The hole gets bigger, and eventually companies feel obligated to use it for SOMETHING, so that they can "spin" their mistakes into something less obviously bad, whether for their ego or career's sake. So no matter what we hear about "listening", if you're continuing to dig that hole even deeper, I will expect it to be forced on us, eventually.
IMHO, you'd do best to start at zero. Put together a super-bare-minimum slashdot layout that is still fully functional, then insert whatever hacks are necessary for proper layout on common platforms, and get some public input at that point. I wouldn't be surprised if only a few simple color/layout changes would then make it a nice site, and you'll have your mobile site, ready to have extra junk tacked on for the desktop version.
Of all the energy used in the industrialized world, about half is used for transportation in the form of oil. In order to replace all cars with electrics, we would have to literally double all electric generation and transmission capability
Not all "transportation" is cars, by quite a long shot. Trains, planes, ships, semis, etc. We can switch all cars to electricity while those continue to burn oil (or natural gas), and then figure their futures out, later.
And you certainly won't DOUBLE electrical generation. Electric cars are ideal, because most of them will not be charging during peak hours. Off-peak, demand drops to under 50% of peak load, leaving plenty of electrical capacity available for charging all those vehicles. The power plants will just be more fully utilized around the clock, than they are now. Of course that's a bit oversimplified, but mostly true, and only very modest increases in electrical production capacity will be needed.
Cisco found the closest duplicate replacement part in another state, chartered a flight to a nearby airport, had a taxi driver on standby when the plane arrived, and delivered it to our door within about four hours of reporting the fairly minor problem.
For far less money than the Cisco support contract, you could have just bought several spares of each model of Cisco device, and have had the replacement on-hand a quickly as you could walk over and grab it.
That's been my experience with Cisco TAC all-around. Their "support" is so awful that maintaining a testing lab is far more cost-effective, and far less frustrating to your IT department. Hell, I'd count Cisco TAC as less-than-worthless, as they constantly waste large amounts of my time trying to understand the issue, have me gather logs of obviously irrelevant information, and worst of all, always tell me I'm wrong, or that their hardware can't work for non-trivial-job XYZ, leaving me to convince my boss that even though they are representatives of the manufacturer, they're idiots that don't actually know anything, and have zero motivation to help.
I HATE Google+ for one simple reason... Google is trying very, very hard to push it down the throats of everyone using any google services.
I used-to write reviews for Android apps in the Play Store, no problem... Now I can't do so, nor even vote an app, or a review of an app as helpful, unhelpful, or flag it as spam, without a G+ account. Nag nag nag. Strange that everything worked fine before G+, but now G+ is strictly required.
Nearly the same is true for YouTube. There is no end to the nagging about linking a G+ account. And they make it a one-click process, so you click "OK" once by accident, and you've got a G+ account populated with your private information and address book from your gmail account, and all your information is now subjected to their insanely intrusive G+ (lack-of...) privacy policy.
Staying in place is what gets you benefit time, raises, etc... It used to be how one gets a pension too back when they had those. I save a lot in my 401k but I don't see how I am ever going to retire!... Stay and build up that vacation time!
You've got it backwards... The last several companies I worked for had a policy that raises were limited to 3% max, or the average level of inflation. In other words, do a spectacular job, year over year, and you'll break even. Have just a good year, and your pay is effectively cut by 1-3%. Many (most?) companies go out of their way to NOT retain people... I'm not going to try swimming up-stream.
So, in the face of never getting ahead, how do you get a raise? Switch companies... Those doing the hiring have far more leeway to negotiate an initial salary. Apparently, they want to throw lots of money at the devil they DON'T know. I've actually nearly DOUBLED my salary, each of the last 4 times I've changed jobs. Hint: Don't ever tell anyone your salary history, it will never HELP you.
And that goes for paid vacation and personal days too... New employers each add a week more than the last one. And retirement benefits, too... My last employer had 40% matching contributions to your 401k plan. And with that whole doubling of salaries, thanks to job shopping, I don't really need it, and will have plenty of cash to retire on (barring some horrible unforeseen catastrophe).
You seem to have bought into the myth your employer wants you to believe, about how your loyalty will be rewarded, and not how they'll give you your walking papers the INSTANT you're not providing enough value to them, or perhaps just because their quarterly profits aren't quite big enough. It's a fool's errand to be loyal to a sociopathic inanimate object like a corporation.
Meanwhile jobs are created and destroyed. Workers are hired and layed off.
Are they? Or do most of the employees keep working for the same subcontractor, year-after-year, on a mix of public and private projects depending on which way the tides of funding are flowing?
You could have the digital signal only contain the extra information for the HD image
You have no idea what you're talking about.
A) It would look HORRIBLE for part of the picture to be crystal-clear digital MPEG-2, and part of it to be staticy analog. B) Analog NTSC signal already uses up the full 6MHz. There is no room for this digital signal. B) MPEG-2 and all other lossy video codecs are not linear. Cut half the picture off, and you only get a tiny bitrate savings, nowhere close to what you would expect. By removing random bits, MPEG-2 wouldn't work AT ALL, and would have insanely bad efficiency.
In case of slightly bad reception, it could still display the analogue part and give you a lower quality image instead of no image at all, or an image with so many problems that it is equivalent to no image at all.
Digital doesn't work as badly as people like to claim. Instead, I had analog channels which were barely above the noise floor and painful to try to pick the audio and picture out of the static, which became perfect digital channels.
If broadcasters cared about those on the fringes, they'd just increase the percentage of ECC data in the digital stream. Instead, they'd rather have better picture and more sub-channels for those with good reception.
All criticisms of the 286 ISA are relevant today as the current x86_64 ISAs are merely extensions of that old ISA
No, they aren't relevant anywhere that they've been deprecated in favor of better alternatives that are available. Ranting about a 286 not having an MMU is, of course not true of modern chips. The same goes for complaining that x86 doesn't have enough registers, when x64 certainly does.
adding instructions to the decoder increase complexity at a faster than linear rate. What x86 really needs is a hard reset like ARM
The instruction decoder is a very tiny portion of the chip in modern CPUs. It doesn't significantly affect performance or cost. It's a non-issue, that continues to get ever smaller. And that legacy support is immensely worthwhile to customers, so throwing it out would cost sales, for almost no performance or price improvement. Hell, you mentioned China's MIPS efforts in a great light, but they're going out of their way to add some x86 instructions to their MIPS chip for better binary translation. Why aren't you railing against them?
If Intel wanted a real game, they would start using Alpha internally and add a secondary x86 to Alpha decoder and offer Alpha on the mobile end and Alpha/x86 on the mid-high end.
Alpha lost. When introduced it was many times faster than x86, but despite all their R&D, the margin was closing more and more with every revision. Intel & AMD got some good stuff from Alpha, but it's not the panacea you're looking for.
RMI made a MIPS64 that is a 8-core (32-thead) monster with 12MB of cache, running at 1.2GHz (specs say up to 2.0GHz). It was designed for network switches and allowed for 40Gbps of traffic per chip (10Gbps encrypted/compressed on the fly) and was rated for less than 50 watts of power, all while back on 40nm
This is just the usual apples to oranges comparison. You could no doubt get an ASIC that'll get more throughput with even less power.
MIPS is already big and Loongson seems to indicate that China is willing to throw a lot of weight behind the MIPS architecture (for example using MIPS in their upcoming 100 petaflop supercomputer scheduled for 2015).
MIPS *was* big a decade or two ago, but they've been losing market share dramatically to ARM. MIPS has some strongholds, and there's a little talk that the parent company is going to try to turn things around, but there's no sign of progress on that front, yet. China is absolutely NOT dedicated to MIPS. They haven't put much effort into Loongson in YEARS. They claimed parity with 1GHz P4 CPUs, then sat on their hands, and did almost nothing more. They aren't willing to put in the money to make it competitive, and no private company has picked up the torch, either. MIPS remains the dirt-cheap econo-proc option.
I don't disagree, EXCEPT, if AMD disappears, x86 instantly becomes 100% Intel proprietary.
Now, maybe some other company could come along and use AMD's x64 instructions, plus only the Intel x86 bits that aren't under patent or some such, some of their own, and then compilers and binaries will only need minor changes... But that's a hell of a lot of work, so I wouldn't assume it'll happen.
Think about that for a minute -- you call PayPal and tell them:
"I have forgotten the last 4 digits of my credit card number, can you give them to me".
In what bizzaro parallel universe does that even make sense? There is no amount of "social engineering" that can explain why you need someone to tell you the last 4 digits of YOUR credit card.
You don't ASK for the last 4 digits explicitly... That wouldn't hardly be "social engineering" would it?
You would ask something like: "The seller is saying he didn't receive the money. Which payment method did I use for my last transaction?"
Paypal isn't going to start reading expiration dates, issuing bank, card colors, etc., they're going to jump straight to the last-4 digits to identify which specific credit card was used. And there's nothing wrong with that (except not correctly identifying the person on the phone to begin with). PCI-DSS explicitly allows saving the last 4 digits of the card in the clear. You can't make a purchase with just that info, and it really doesn't make it possible to guess the rest of the digits, the CVV2, etc.
The last 4 digits of your credit cards are every bit as public as your date of birth, street address, phone number, mother's maiden name, etc. And any company that allows access to sensitive accounts from just that information, has zero security. And if their lack of security allows someone else to steal or misuse something you've paid for (like DNS entries) then they're is serious legal trouble.
R&D money translated into faster chips, and all the R&D money was obviously on the market leader, first the x86 and then the amd64 architectures.
Except x86 wasn't the most profitable, so it didn't get all the R&D money. Entire companies were built around proprietary lock-in. Without a good CPU, customers won't buy your servers, your OSes, your other software, your support contract, etc. Those proprietary architectures absolutely got lots of R&D, as multi-billion dollar businesses were depending on that competitive advantage. Companies like Oracle/Sun, IBM, and HP are still clinging to that model, and indeed, IBM's POWER processors are still competitive, usually.
Your criticisms are probably quite apt for a 286 process. Some might be relevant to 686 processors too... But they make no sense in a world that has switched to x86-64.
The proprietary processor wars are over. Alpha and Vax are dead. PA-RISC is dead. MIPS has been relegated to the low-end. SPARC is slowly drowning. And even Itanium's days are severely numbered. Only POWER has kept pace, in fits and starts, and for all the loud press, ARM is only biting at x86's ankles.
x86 has been shown able to not just keep pace but outclass every other architecture. Complain about CISC all you want, but the instruction complexity made it easy to keep bolting on more instructions... From MMX to SSE3 and everything in-between. The complaints about idiosyncracies are quite important to the 5 x86 ASM programmers out there, and compilier writers, and nobody else.
I wouldn't mind a future where MIPS CPUs overtake x64, but any debate about the future of processors ended when AMD skillfully managed the 64-bit transition, and they and Intel killed off all the competition. With CPU prices falling to a pittance, and no heavy computational loads found for the average person, there's no benefit to be had, even in the wildest imagination, of switching the PC world to a different architecture, painful transition or no.
They could have chosen a digital broadcast TV standard that was backwards-compatible with the older signalling system. It existed. It was one of the choices.
ATSC is digital. NTSC was analog. There is no way to have an analog-compatible high-definition digital broadcast standard, without just having two channels operating side-by-side, which would be the worst of both worlds.
Instead they went with a brand-new protocol, that made all old TVs obsolete, unless they bought an expensive converter box and antenna.
Converter boxes were all only $10-15 after the NTIA coupons every household got two of. And these days, you can get a digital converter with USB, photo/audio/video (MPEG-4, H.264, WMV, etc.) playback, and full DVR/PVR functions, for all of $30, like the EMatic AT103B from Walmart:
You certainly don't need a new antenna. A select few people may have lost a few channels, but that was really unrelated to the digital switchover, and just an opportune moment for broadcasters to save some money.
The result? Relatively few people in the U.S. watch broadcast TV anymore.
The number of OTA viewers has GROWN significantly after the switch to digital, and cable companies are seeing declining subscriber counts as a result. Many of those who could get static-filled analog TV broadcasts didn't want them, and resorted to the better picture quality of cable or satellite. These days, OTA is now the BEST picture you can get, and cable and satellite are the inferior choices, which also cost obscene amounts of money for very little value-add.
The most recent reports conclude: "OTA television is growing in importance to more Americans as percentage of TV households whose only source of TV is received off-air has climbed to nearly 20 percent"
And the biggest percentage of those cable TV subscribers are old baby boomers, who will simply die off in the coming years, and shift the numbers increasingly towards OTA:
"The research also found that younger households are more likely to be OTA-only. Among households headed by someone 18 to 34 years of age, 28 percent are broadcast-only"
If you want to kill off a technology, abandoning backward compatibility is a great way to do it.
Maintaining TOO MUCH backwards compatibility is a great way undermine NEW technologies, too. If you look at something like Ethernet, which seems to have an unbroken chain of compatibility, in fact they only maintain compatibility a single generation back, and discard what came further before. Notice that the GigE cards don't come with AUI or BNC connectors? Notice that there are no GigE hubs? That GigE doesn't work over the CAT-3 cabling that was installed en-mass way back when? And in the future, CAT-5 will go out the window, too.
Today, with 802.11ac available, it's long past time to eliminate 802.11b compatibility, making that 802.11g equipment faster.
Slashdot Mirror
While that should be addressed, the "gap" is not an absolute thing. The rich can get richer, without making the poor any poorer.
In fact, technology is making the poor richer. Goods and services are getting dramatically cheaper. Someone in the middle class could live for YEARS off what they earn in one year, if they tried to do so. Instead, people tend to spend all the money they earn, on the most expensive luxuries they can afford, but that doesn't negate the point.
The exceptions seem to be a few things like land in the most desirable areas.
No truth to that at all. We grow more than enough food for everyone on the planet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"In 1990, it was estimated that the world could feed up to 35 billion people."
There *IS* an effectively unlimited amount of water on the planet. To be exact: 1,409,560,910 cubic kilometers.
Air pollution is not even a problem, if you've got free energy... You can filter out ANY pollutants with the proper scrubbers.
Awesome rebuttal! All those facts and figures!
There's ample space across the surface of the earth for several orders of magnitude more people, without resorting to even basic technology like high-rises, let alone exotic technology like landfill in the oceans, space stations, etc.
http://overpopulationisamyth.c...
And just what resources are "limited"? With enough energy you can extract the carbons from the air to make more oil from scratch, pull trace elements of anything out of seawater, etc. And with cheap energy it's a no-brainer to start mining the moon, Mars, or asteroids for anything we'd want.
This *IS* reality. The build-out of wind turbines and solar power plants, means there will soon be peaks of excessive FREE (or NEGATIVE priced) energy from time to time.
When those events become common enough (to ensure quick returns on the up-front capital investment), any energy-intensive processes that can be "batch" processed, become practical and maybe even profitable. Desalination and pumping water uphill are great candidates, as they can variably supplement other water sources without disruption, and can be more efficient than electrolysis of water into hydrogen.
If you're buying an Audi or a BMW, the price of replacing a headlight is not something that's going to concern you...
And the up-front price is very misleading... While a basic halogen headlight may only cost around $10, it uses 8X more electricity than an equivalent LED, and only lasts perhaps 1/10th as long. So you'll save money with LEDs from not having to replace them as often, not to mention the benefit of never having your lights burn out for the lifetime of the car. But the real savings comes from using 1/8th as much electricity... The conversion losses from gasoline to kinetic, then to electricity are huge, and the electricity savings from switching to LEDs will noticably affect your gas mileage on any reasoably fuel efficient vehicle.
I'm always amazed when I find dirt cheap devices running Linux, like my $30 D-Link router capable of DD-WRT with USB. no-name 24-port enterprise switches, or $40 DVD players with Divx and USB support.
Under what circumstances will the full $10,000 reward be offered?
I have a powerful laser, and I know where to find a large supply of homeless people (who wouldn't mind a few months in jail if they got a $2,000 check at the end of it).
Sure, you can't repeat this trick in the same area, with the same witnesses, but with a big enough payoff it would be a worthwhile business venture.
Plenty of it is NOT. Led Zeppelin CDs for one...
Just because you can point to one microkernel that doesn't really work, and one monolithic kernel that does, will not invalidate the perfectly valid points made about the benefits of modularization. Yours is just a logical fallacy:
eg. "I'm sure everybody that likes bicycles never drives a car..."
Paragraph 6 of TFA...
When there's an outright rebellion, and yet you chose to proceed, that's not what I'd call "listening"... A few individuals may be hearing the complaints, but unless those in charge are responsive to them, it will never qualify as "listening".
Crapping on your customer more slowly (and randomly) is still crapping on your customers. Until you've fixed ALL the problems you know about, there's no point in inflicting it those known issues upon more unwilling victims.
I believe the mobile site, and the beta site are wothless lost causes, and they need a complete rethink and redesign. By trying to "fix" them, you're throwing away more money and time. When a hole gets big enough, people get trapped by it,. The hole gets bigger, and eventually companies feel obligated to use it for SOMETHING, so that they can "spin" their mistakes into something less obviously bad, whether for their ego or career's sake. So no matter what we hear about "listening", if you're continuing to dig that hole even deeper, I will expect it to be forced on us, eventually.
IMHO, you'd do best to start at zero. Put together a super-bare-minimum slashdot layout that is still fully functional, then insert whatever hacks are necessary for proper layout on common platforms, and get some public input at that point. I wouldn't be surprised if only a few simple color/layout changes would then make it a nice site, and you'll have your mobile site, ready to have extra junk tacked on for the desktop version.
Not all "transportation" is cars, by quite a long shot. Trains, planes, ships, semis, etc. We can switch all cars to electricity while those continue to burn oil (or natural gas), and then figure their futures out, later.
And you certainly won't DOUBLE electrical generation. Electric cars are ideal, because most of them will not be charging during peak hours. Off-peak, demand drops to under 50% of peak load, leaving plenty of electrical capacity available for charging all those vehicles. The power plants will just be more fully utilized around the clock, than they are now. Of course that's a bit oversimplified, but mostly true, and only very modest increases in electrical production capacity will be needed.
For far less money than the Cisco support contract, you could have just bought several spares of each model of Cisco device, and have had the replacement on-hand a quickly as you could walk over and grab it.
That's been my experience with Cisco TAC all-around. Their "support" is so awful that maintaining a testing lab is far more cost-effective, and far less frustrating to your IT department. Hell, I'd count Cisco TAC as less-than-worthless, as they constantly waste large amounts of my time trying to understand the issue, have me gather logs of obviously irrelevant information, and worst of all, always tell me I'm wrong, or that their hardware can't work for non-trivial-job XYZ, leaving me to convince my boss that even though they are representatives of the manufacturer, they're idiots that don't actually know anything, and have zero motivation to help.
I HATE Google+ for one simple reason... Google is trying very, very hard to push it down the throats of everyone using any google services.
I used-to write reviews for Android apps in the Play Store, no problem... Now I can't do so, nor even vote an app, or a review of an app as helpful, unhelpful, or flag it as spam, without a G+ account. Nag nag nag. Strange that everything worked fine before G+, but now G+ is strictly required.
Nearly the same is true for YouTube. There is no end to the nagging about linking a G+ account. And they make it a one-click process, so you click "OK" once by accident, and you've got a G+ account populated with your private information and address book from your gmail account, and all your information is now subjected to their insanely intrusive G+ (lack-of...) privacy policy.
Google+ is plain, old-fashioned, SPAM.
You've got it backwards... The last several companies I worked for had a policy that raises were limited to 3% max, or the average level of inflation. In other words, do a spectacular job, year over year, and you'll break even. Have just a good year, and your pay is effectively cut by 1-3%. Many (most?) companies go out of their way to NOT retain people... I'm not going to try swimming up-stream.
So, in the face of never getting ahead, how do you get a raise? Switch companies... Those doing the hiring have far more leeway to negotiate an initial salary. Apparently, they want to throw lots of money at the devil they DON'T know. I've actually nearly DOUBLED my salary, each of the last 4 times I've changed jobs. Hint: Don't ever tell anyone your salary history, it will never HELP you.
And that goes for paid vacation and personal days too... New employers each add a week more than the last one. And retirement benefits, too... My last employer had 40% matching contributions to your 401k plan. And with that whole doubling of salaries, thanks to job shopping, I don't really need it, and will have plenty of cash to retire on (barring some horrible unforeseen catastrophe).
You seem to have bought into the myth your employer wants you to believe, about how your loyalty will be rewarded, and not how they'll give you your walking papers the INSTANT you're not providing enough value to them, or perhaps just because their quarterly profits aren't quite big enough. It's a fool's errand to be loyal to a sociopathic inanimate object like a corporation.
Are they? Or do most of the employees keep working for the same subcontractor, year-after-year, on a mix of public and private projects depending on which way the tides of funding are flowing?
You have no idea what you're talking about.
A) It would look HORRIBLE for part of the picture to be crystal-clear digital MPEG-2, and part of it to be staticy analog.
B) Analog NTSC signal already uses up the full 6MHz. There is no room for this digital signal.
B) MPEG-2 and all other lossy video codecs are not linear. Cut half the picture off, and you only get a tiny bitrate savings, nowhere close to what you would expect. By removing random bits, MPEG-2 wouldn't work AT ALL, and would have insanely bad efficiency.
Digital doesn't work as badly as people like to claim. Instead, I had analog channels which were barely above the noise floor and painful to try to pick the audio and picture out of the static, which became perfect digital channels.
If broadcasters cared about those on the fringes, they'd just increase the percentage of ECC data in the digital stream. Instead, they'd rather have better picture and more sub-channels for those with good reception.
No, they aren't relevant anywhere that they've been deprecated in favor of better alternatives that are available. Ranting about a 286 not having an MMU is, of course not true of modern chips. The same goes for complaining that x86 doesn't have enough registers, when x64 certainly does.
The instruction decoder is a very tiny portion of the chip in modern CPUs. It doesn't significantly affect performance or cost. It's a non-issue, that continues to get ever smaller. And that legacy support is immensely worthwhile to customers, so throwing it out would cost sales, for almost no performance or price improvement. Hell, you mentioned China's MIPS efforts in a great light, but they're going out of their way to add some x86 instructions to their MIPS chip for better binary translation. Why aren't you railing against them?
Alpha lost. When introduced it was many times faster than x86, but despite all their R&D, the margin was closing more and more with every revision. Intel & AMD got some good stuff from Alpha, but it's not the panacea you're looking for.
This is just the usual apples to oranges comparison. You could no doubt get an ASIC that'll get more throughput with even less power.
MIPS *was* big a decade or two ago, but they've been losing market share dramatically to ARM. MIPS has some strongholds, and there's a little talk that the parent company is going to try to turn things around, but there's no sign of progress on that front, yet. China is absolutely NOT dedicated to MIPS. They haven't put much effort into Loongson in YEARS. They claimed parity with 1GHz P4 CPUs, then sat on their hands, and did almost nothing more. They aren't willing to put in the money to make it competitive, and no private company has picked up the torch, either. MIPS remains the dirt-cheap econo-proc option.
My head asplode.
I don't disagree, EXCEPT, if AMD disappears, x86 instantly becomes 100% Intel proprietary.
Now, maybe some other company could come along and use AMD's x64 instructions, plus only the Intel x86 bits that aren't under patent or some such, some of their own, and then compilers and binaries will only need minor changes... But that's a hell of a lot of work, so I wouldn't assume it'll happen.
You don't ASK for the last 4 digits explicitly... That wouldn't hardly be "social engineering" would it?
You would ask something like: "The seller is saying he didn't receive the money. Which payment method did I use for my last transaction?"
Paypal isn't going to start reading expiration dates, issuing bank, card colors, etc., they're going to jump straight to the last-4 digits to identify which specific credit card was used. And there's nothing wrong with that (except not correctly identifying the person on the phone to begin with). PCI-DSS explicitly allows saving the last 4 digits of the card in the clear. You can't make a purchase with just that info, and it really doesn't make it possible to guess the rest of the digits, the CVV2, etc.
The last 4 digits of your credit cards are every bit as public as your date of birth, street address, phone number, mother's maiden name, etc. And any company that allows access to sensitive accounts from just that information, has zero security. And if their lack of security allows someone else to steal or misuse something you've paid for (like DNS entries) then they're is serious legal trouble.
Except x86 wasn't the most profitable, so it didn't get all the R&D money. Entire companies were built around proprietary lock-in. Without a good CPU, customers won't buy your servers, your OSes, your other software, your support contract, etc. Those proprietary architectures absolutely got lots of R&D, as multi-billion dollar businesses were depending on that competitive advantage. Companies like Oracle/Sun, IBM, and HP are still clinging to that model, and indeed, IBM's POWER processors are still competitive, usually.
Your criticisms are probably quite apt for a 286 process. Some might be relevant to 686 processors too... But they make no sense in a world that has switched to x86-64.
The proprietary processor wars are over. Alpha and Vax are dead. PA-RISC is dead. MIPS has been relegated to the low-end. SPARC is slowly drowning. And even Itanium's days are severely numbered. Only POWER has kept pace, in fits and starts, and for all the loud press, ARM is only biting at x86's ankles.
x86 has been shown able to not just keep pace but outclass every other architecture. Complain about CISC all you want, but the instruction complexity made it easy to keep bolting on more instructions... From MMX to SSE3 and everything in-between. The complaints about idiosyncracies are quite important to the 5 x86 ASM programmers out there, and compilier writers, and nobody else.
I wouldn't mind a future where MIPS CPUs overtake x64, but any debate about the future of processors ended when AMD skillfully managed the 64-bit transition, and they and Intel killed off all the competition. With CPU prices falling to a pittance, and no heavy computational loads found for the average person, there's no benefit to be had, even in the wildest imagination, of switching the PC world to a different architecture, painful transition or no.
ATSC is digital. NTSC was analog. There is no way to have an analog-compatible high-definition digital broadcast standard, without just having two channels operating side-by-side, which would be the worst of both worlds.
Converter boxes were all only $10-15 after the NTIA coupons every household got two of. And these days, you can get a digital converter with USB, photo/audio/video (MPEG-4, H.264, WMV, etc.) playback, and full DVR/PVR functions, for all of $30, like the EMatic AT103B from Walmart:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Emat...
You certainly don't need a new antenna. A select few people may have lost a few channels, but that was really unrelated to the digital switchover, and just an opportune moment for broadcasters to save some money.
The number of OTA viewers has GROWN significantly after the switch to digital, and cable companies are seeing declining subscriber counts as a result. Many of those who could get static-filled analog TV broadcasts didn't want them, and resorted to the better picture quality of cable or satellite. These days, OTA is now the BEST picture you can get, and cable and satellite are the inferior choices, which also cost obscene amounts of money for very little value-add.
The most recent reports conclude: "OTA television is growing in importance to more Americans as percentage of TV households whose only source of TV is received off-air has climbed to nearly 20 percent"
And the biggest percentage of those cable TV subscribers are old baby boomers, who will simply die off in the coming years, and shift the numbers increasingly towards OTA:
"The research also found that younger households are more likely to be OTA-only. Among households headed by someone 18 to 34 years of age, 28 percent are broadcast-only"
http://broadcastengineering.co...
Maintaining TOO MUCH backwards compatibility is a great way undermine NEW technologies, too. If you look at something like Ethernet, which seems to have an unbroken chain of compatibility, in fact they only maintain compatibility a single generation back, and discard what came further before. Notice that the GigE cards don't come with AUI or BNC connectors? Notice that there are no GigE hubs? That GigE doesn't work over the CAT-3 cabling that was installed en-mass way back when? And in the future, CAT-5 will go out the window, too.
Today, with 802.11ac available, it's long past time to eliminate 802.11b compatibility, making that 802.11g equipment faster.