...is getting (non-technical) clients to understand the possibilities and limitations of Web technologies, design decisions, and all the other factors that can make or break a website project, as well as the site itself.
Most people who do web design/programming already know that it is a hybrid field. It has a lot in common with technical support, and a lot in common with graphic design: Both fields are less about what you know and can do, and more about how well you can market yourself and understand your client's needs (in the case of tech support, special needs). A lot of people think that because they're good with computers, they should head into IT work. And everybody needs a website, right? Web technologies are fairly easy to master, and so there are always books and classrooms eager to accept money to teach people this. But then they get out in the real world and realize that they've only got half the puzzle. People get out of the field as often as they get in because of this.
IT work is a spectrum from engineering to marketing. But most of us are in 'glue' positions -- our job is to improve existing business processes, which means we need to understand that business process first. It's an aspect of our field that even most people who've been in it for ten years or more can't really articulate. You can't really teach interpersonal skills per se, you have to earn it with experience.
Apparently so did the rest of the world, and they seem to have taken it out on SGI. Poor SGI... it wasn't their fault!
SGI didn't fall from glory because of a three-coiled Lucas-branded turd. It failed because it made repeated strategic mistakes in the market. When 3D hit the desktop, they sat there watching people build clusters out of gaming consoles and making boards out of commodity components -- management was convinced it wasn't a threat. Then they made several attempts to change platforms to various Intel chips, and released Linux workstations. People didn't take them seriously after that (Yes, I am saying on slashdot that using Linux was a strategic mistake). They were nearly dead, delisted from the NYC, shareholders demanding they fold -- when they finally reversed course, hired a crisis team, and assessed the damage. But it was too late -- the economy didn't allow for a recovery, and the vulnerable shell of SGI was bought out, and its brand identity assumed by a company specializing in rackmount servers.
SGI died because management lost focus, got complacent, and fried like an egg in a frying pan in the recession. Besides, Hollywood was never SGI's main market -- it was the government and scientific institutions. For every CG animation you see, there's ten weather modeling simulations, and other massively-parallel graphic-intensive processes.
We should condemn transsexualism and lesbianism as an immoral affront to the Wonder of God's creation.
A more recent version of morality is available. Changes include: Better support for alternative system configurations, 32bit color (your version is 1 bit), and fault tolerance.
Fortunately for the rest of us, the FSM is compatible with the GPL.
The GPL allows you to modify the original work. The bible, however, clearly states that it is the word of God and should not be modified. It is therefore not GPL-compatible. The codebase it's based on is also of dubious origin.
But even if the licensing terms weren't crap, it'll never catch on. It's a buggy beta release that's been ported to other languages or forked dozens of times because the developers can never agree on a single design. It's also not very user-friendly: The interface tends to kill people, especially before you patch it to SP1 (New Testament). I'd be surprised if they aren't bankrupt in a year.
Next, those nativity scenes they try and throw up every winter will be declared illegal now because they haven't paid to license it from God. Atheists, you may now stop attempting to keep the church and state separate: Apparently, God has made himself illegal. Film at 11.
She's a dyke AND a transsexual[...]And its not like I'm outing her, she's wearing it proudly as her username...
My dick is a foot long and sitting in the bedroom closet next to the leather harness. Imagine that next time you sit in your mother's basement with the lights off and masturbate -- it is the stuff of hetrosexual male nightmares.
girlintraining take pity upon the poor Ethanol-fueled fool and at least let him know if he amuses you in some small way..... causes there's nothing better than an offtopic attempt at romance for a Friday night slashdot post.
Maybe it would be nicer to you if you made it a sandwich and brought it a cold beer once in a while.
When it's evolved to the point where it can make its own sandwich and drink its own beer, I might consider it. Also, he's dull, short, and stinks. No wonder he can't get a date.
in the intercommunication between public administration offices, public utility companies, citizens and voluntarily joining private companies, conducted via the central governmental system.
That's the trouble with standards: There's so many to choose from! Government of any kind has always faced the same problem -- how to efficiently communication amongst its many branches and divisions. And I, for one, am quite thankful that the problem won't be solved anytime soon. Nobody truly wants all the government they pay for.
Every time he drives in front of my house, my TV goes wild, I sometimes can hear alien like sounding voices coming from the TV, my wireless connection drops and my clothes dryer even starts to spin backward !
It's a Dodge Colt, not a TARDIS. You can only blame the wireless drops on the car. The voices chanting "Exterminate! Exterminate!" are a different problem...
The precise point of video games is to be some other than yourself for awhile. If they start restricting people based on their physical appearance, how long until we start using other biometric data? The major appeal of video games is shattered when we lose that... who wants to play a video game as themselves?
I thought it was obvious simply because they're a publicly-traded company: Protect their own asses first. If Google could be subjected to substantially negative press, delist the site. Rationalizations come later in the form of policies, laws, rules, and procedures.
Your expression of delightful and joyful items is making those in the Northwest, British Isles, and recently kitten-less population unhappy. Please refrain from any further emotions or we will be forced to take action against you.
You must be Welsh -- I say something awesome and you find fault with it.
The police were waiting for her when she got to campus.
And when they found nothing and didn't charge her, the campus administration should have shrugged, said "okay. Well, can't be too careful these days!" and went on their merry way.
This will serves as an example to others. She doesn't own the campus and getting tossed therefrom isn't different than being fired for cause by an employer.
First, I'm not sure it's the example we want to set. Second, unlike being fired -- she's got thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of student loans now that she owes and possibly no way to complete her degree. She may need to start over if those credits aren't transferable. Also, she didn't say this in the classroom. She said it in a semi-public forum, and if it was a credible threat, where are the police?
Because if she isn't charged with a crime, she's being punished for something that is apparently completely legal to do in public -- and being punished for doing so. Is that the lesson we want to teach? That someone merely needs to be offended to visit personal hardship and grief on their head?
The teachers were worried about violence not about a joke.
The teachers had nothing to do with this. the administration was worried about getting their asses sued if that 0.1% chance that the student acted on the stated impulses. It looks very bad in this political climate to advocate a reasonable position like "it did not seem like a credible threat." That statement does not protect a person or group from millions in lawsuit damages, or in legal fees. It's easier to throw the baby out with the bath water.
It was a joke-- A morbid joke, a joke in bad taste, and possibly it could even be said that the person who made the comment had a serious lapse of judgement, but it was still a joke. Why? Because I've said things like that during finals week, which is exactly what this poor girl did! It's not like she's sitting at home polishing her gun and muttering "the time of purification is at hand" over and over again and has a date circled on the calendar or anything. She is a young adult who was frustrated with academic life. zomfg.
Yes, actually, but that's not the material issue here. If they want to put in an instruction that says "if processor_type 'Intel' then skip_optimizations=1" then all the power to them. It's theirs. Not AMDs. Not yours.
You are saying that what Intel did with their compiler is perfectly legitimate. I don't see how you can spin that as anything but defending them.
In defending the liberties of others, you're often forced to side with scum.
they are not allowed control over their own products to they extent they can harm competition in the market as they please. The only possible "issue" is whether their actions did or did not illegally harm competition.
So if I design two products (say, iTunes and an iPod) that work well together.. and then a third party comes along and designs something that works with either of them, that's okay and I get that. But if the product is then changed so the third party's products no longer work, that's always bad? It's always anticompetitive? What you're suggesting here is that not "harming the competition" is more important than a company's right to design its products to be as beneficial to use together as possible. If the company signed a legal contract stating that the third party's products would be supported, then yes -- I'd say it's illegal. But if the third party never entered into any kind of agreement, then the other is free to do whatever they damn well want with their own products.
Okay, now I'm definitely sure you don't understand the slightest bit about the technology involved. The CPU is already "unbundled" from everything to the maximum extent technically possible. They cannot "unbundle" it any further.
You're oversimplifying the issue, and then calling me an idiot? The use of generalizations does not imply that the author's understanding of the subject matter is limited. And no, they're very bundled -- I can't use an AMD processor with an Intel chipset. Motherboards are designed around the CPUs -- and while the peripherals (memory, expansion cards, etc.) may have standardized interfaces, the guts of the system does not.
If there were published standards about how CPUs connect to the mainboard, and if the mainboard's major components were made interoperable (open BIOS, SMC, all that jazz--) that would be unbundling. The bottom line here is that if these parts were interchangable -- so that you didn't have to decide on the CPU first and then the rest of the system, that would be "unbundled". That would be a more fair marketplace than what exists right now.
Now I am not getting into any more technical detail than this, because it's pointless dick-waving. We're here to debate an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with the technology!
threatening to kill someone publicly is never a good idea.
People say stupid things when they're angry. Everybody knows this, and in a normal and well-adjusted society where we calmly and rationally look at the available facts, we'd remember this. Motive and means, those are the questions nobody asks -- because when you have a zero tolerance policy you don't have to ask questions anymore. Zero tolerance policies aren't there to keep you safe -- it's there to keep the administration safe.
I often joke about sucking out people's souls, or asking friends if they'll need help moving the body of whomever they're annoyed with, or any one of a dozen other euphemisms for killing, death, destruction, mayhem, etc. Why? Because conjuring up mental imagery of the object of our anger in pain and suffering is carthetic. We bond with our friends over our mutual dislike of others -- establishing an us and a them. It's not politically vogue to acknowledge this aspect of the human condition, but it's something we all do to varying degrees and it's healthy.
If we can't laugh at ourselves as a society -- if we can't let some things go and just say "Okay, maybe that was a bit much. Let's not do that next time," then we're setting ourselves up for a very big fall. I've seen what happens when people straightjacket themselves into not showing negative emotions. They look fine, right up until they snap. And then a whole bunch of people get hurt (or even killed) because today was the day they decided to make their own personal, Custerian stand against the world over some stupid, minor thing.
And the really sad part about it is -- when people do snap, we demonize them. They were sick and twisted individuals, and absolutely nothing like you and I. Bullshit -- they were exactly like you and me. They just couldn't take it anymore, whereas you and I, we're willing to keep our heads down, smile, and pretend nothing at all is wrong. And die a little inside each day for it. We're all victims in this. All of us.
What the fuck is it that you american's live in such state of paranoia?
Relentless public announcements that we should accept our neighbor and be considerate of each other's differences. It's to the point now where people can't even make self-deprecating comments about their own race or sex without being fired for being racist or sexist. Jokes have become illegal. We've made negative feelings essentially taboo -- you can't express anger, dissatisfaction, or anything but sunshine and kittens.
The laws of thermodynamics also loosely apply to social problems: In this case, the rate at which negative emotions are created hasn't changed, but the available space they exist within has been constrained. This has led to a rise in pressure and temperature. Naturally, leaks develop, which result in high pressure discharges into the relative vaccum of positive emotions, which are suspiciously absent right now due to an economic turndown, a lack of socialization amongst our peers (due to the constant fear of them), and so yeah...
We've made it illegal to cry tears, and so... some have started to cry bullets. I'm sorry to say, America -- but life is shit. We need to square with that and be honest. A few more fuck you's and honest brawls between people would do us all a lot of good. Yes, I'm advocating violence here -- because a few punches in the face is a lot easier to get over than a few bullets in the back.
The optimizations would have worked, and Intel had the compiler deliberately not apply them.
So Intel should be required to test out their competitors products for compatibility with these optimizations, as well as its own products? Should Microsoft be required to design Windows so that it's compatible with Norton Antivirus -- or is it the other way around? This compiler was designed by Intel, for Intel. That's the bottom line: If they don't want to support other microprocessors, why should they be compelled to? There's no guarantee that these optimizations won't fail in future versions of their competitors products in ways that can't be anticipated -- due to the fact that their microprocessors are black boxes to Intel.
I'm not defending Intel here -- for all I know, it could have been entirely motivated by greed. But that's not the issue here -- the issue is whether Intel is allowed control over its own products. I think the FTC is overstepping its boundaries. They allowed Intel to become the dominant player in the market despite inferior designs because when they were needed most, they looked the other way because the economy was doing well and the FTC was viewed as a nuisance by congress and so had little to no power. Now that the economy's tanked and Congress has (reluctantly) given them the authority to make needed changes, they're a player again. But they're making the wrong decisions, even if they're making them for the right reasons.
If you ask me, the solution is to unbundle the CPU from the rest of the system architecture. I know, it's difficult to imagine even amongst IT people because the CPU has long been the center of the system -- everything is designed around that. Well, maybe it's time for that to change. And the FTC should put its focus there -- just as we unbundled Internet Explorer from Windows -- the software, it's time to unbundle the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
...is getting (non-technical) clients to understand the possibilities and limitations of Web technologies, design decisions, and all the other factors that can make or break a website project, as well as the site itself.
Most people who do web design/programming already know that it is a hybrid field. It has a lot in common with technical support, and a lot in common with graphic design: Both fields are less about what you know and can do, and more about how well you can market yourself and understand your client's needs (in the case of tech support, special needs). A lot of people think that because they're good with computers, they should head into IT work. And everybody needs a website, right? Web technologies are fairly easy to master, and so there are always books and classrooms eager to accept money to teach people this. But then they get out in the real world and realize that they've only got half the puzzle. People get out of the field as often as they get in because of this.
IT work is a spectrum from engineering to marketing. But most of us are in 'glue' positions -- our job is to improve existing business processes, which means we need to understand that business process first. It's an aspect of our field that even most people who've been in it for ten years or more can't really articulate. You can't really teach interpersonal skills per se, you have to earn it with experience.
Apparently so did the rest of the world, and they seem to have taken it out on SGI. Poor SGI... it wasn't their fault!
SGI didn't fall from glory because of a three-coiled Lucas-branded turd. It failed because it made repeated strategic mistakes in the market. When 3D hit the desktop, they sat there watching people build clusters out of gaming consoles and making boards out of commodity components -- management was convinced it wasn't a threat. Then they made several attempts to change platforms to various Intel chips, and released Linux workstations. People didn't take them seriously after that (Yes, I am saying on slashdot that using Linux was a strategic mistake). They were nearly dead, delisted from the NYC, shareholders demanding they fold -- when they finally reversed course, hired a crisis team, and assessed the damage. But it was too late -- the economy didn't allow for a recovery, and the vulnerable shell of SGI was bought out, and its brand identity assumed by a company specializing in rackmount servers.
SGI died because management lost focus, got complacent, and fried like an egg in a frying pan in the recession. Besides, Hollywood was never SGI's main market -- it was the government and scientific institutions. For every CG animation you see, there's ten weather modeling simulations, and other massively-parallel graphic-intensive processes.
Your subject line is about as related to your actual post as someone randomly shouting "Cowboyneal!" on a streetcorner is to world hunger. -_-
We should condemn transsexualism and lesbianism as an immoral affront to the Wonder of God's creation.
A more recent version of morality is available. Changes include: Better support for alternative system configurations, 32bit color (your version is 1 bit), and fault tolerance.
Would you like to install the update now? _
Fortunately for the rest of us, the FSM is compatible with the GPL.
The GPL allows you to modify the original work. The bible, however, clearly states that it is the word of God and should not be modified. It is therefore not GPL-compatible. The codebase it's based on is also of dubious origin.
But even if the licensing terms weren't crap, it'll never catch on. It's a buggy beta release that's been ported to other languages or forked dozens of times because the developers can never agree on a single design. It's also not very user-friendly: The interface tends to kill people, especially before you patch it to SP1 (New Testament). I'd be surprised if they aren't bankrupt in a year.
1900 years later...
Next, those nativity scenes they try and throw up every winter will be declared illegal now because they haven't paid to license it from God. Atheists, you may now stop attempting to keep the church and state separate: Apparently, God has made himself illegal. Film at 11.
She's a dyke AND a transsexual[...]And its not like I'm outing her, she's wearing it proudly as her username...
My dick is a foot long and sitting in the bedroom closet next to the leather harness. Imagine that next time you sit in your mother's basement with the lights off and masturbate -- it is the stuff of hetrosexual male nightmares.
girlintraining take pity upon the poor Ethanol-fueled fool and at least let him know if he amuses you in some small way..... causes there's nothing better than an offtopic attempt at romance for a Friday night slashdot post.
Look at my profile ye mighty, and despair. :}
Maybe it would be nicer to you if you made it a sandwich and brought it a cold beer once in a while.
When it's evolved to the point where it can make its own sandwich and drink its own beer, I might consider it. Also, he's dull, short, and stinks. No wonder he can't get a date.
Wimmins don't belong on teh intranetz. Get back in the kitchen where you belong and let the men handle this.
Says the thing living under the fridge...
in the intercommunication between public administration offices, public utility companies, citizens and voluntarily joining private companies, conducted via the central governmental system.
That's the trouble with standards: There's so many to choose from! Government of any kind has always faced the same problem -- how to efficiently communication amongst its many branches and divisions. And I, for one, am quite thankful that the problem won't be solved anytime soon. Nobody truly wants all the government they pay for.
What the fuck is WTF?
Wireless Transdimensional Frequency. It usually operates on the 456.
Every time he drives in front of my house, my TV goes wild, I sometimes can hear alien like sounding voices coming from the TV, my wireless connection drops and my clothes dryer even starts to spin backward !
It's a Dodge Colt, not a TARDIS. You can only blame the wireless drops on the car. The voices chanting "Exterminate! Exterminate!" are a different problem...
The precise point of video games is to be some other than yourself for awhile. If they start restricting people based on their physical appearance, how long until we start using other biometric data? The major appeal of video games is shattered when we lose that... who wants to play a video game as themselves?
What is their real policy on the issue?
I thought it was obvious simply because they're a publicly-traded company: Protect their own asses first. If Google could be subjected to substantially negative press, delist the site. Rationalizations come later in the form of policies, laws, rules, and procedures.
I'd say we have every right and very good reasons to take quick action in cases of threats or evidence of mental instability.
I can appreciate that. But once the threat has been investigated and found to be innocuous, there's no compelling reason for punishment.
Your expression of delightful and joyful items is making those in the Northwest, British Isles, and recently kitten-less population unhappy. Please refrain from any further emotions or we will be forced to take action against you.
You must be Welsh -- I say something awesome and you find fault with it.
The police were waiting for her when she got to campus.
And when they found nothing and didn't charge her, the campus administration should have shrugged, said "okay. Well, can't be too careful these days!" and went on their merry way.
This will serves as an example to others. She doesn't own the campus and getting tossed therefrom isn't different than being fired for cause by an employer.
First, I'm not sure it's the example we want to set. Second, unlike being fired -- she's got thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of student loans now that she owes and possibly no way to complete her degree. She may need to start over if those credits aren't transferable. Also, she didn't say this in the classroom. She said it in a semi-public forum, and if it was a credible threat, where are the police?
Because if she isn't charged with a crime, she's being punished for something that is apparently completely legal to do in public -- and being punished for doing so. Is that the lesson we want to teach? That someone merely needs to be offended to visit personal hardship and grief on their head?
The teachers were worried about violence not about a joke.
The teachers had nothing to do with this. the administration was worried about getting their asses sued if that 0.1% chance that the student acted on the stated impulses. It looks very bad in this political climate to advocate a reasonable position like "it did not seem like a credible threat." That statement does not protect a person or group from millions in lawsuit damages, or in legal fees. It's easier to throw the baby out with the bath water.
It was a joke-- A morbid joke, a joke in bad taste, and possibly it could even be said that the person who made the comment had a serious lapse of judgement, but it was still a joke. Why? Because I've said things like that during finals week, which is exactly what this poor girl did! It's not like she's sitting at home polishing her gun and muttering "the time of purification is at hand" over and over again and has a date circled on the calendar or anything. She is a young adult who was frustrated with academic life. zomfg.
Do you even have any clue how a compiler works?
Yes, actually, but that's not the material issue here. If they want to put in an instruction that says "if processor_type 'Intel' then skip_optimizations=1" then all the power to them. It's theirs. Not AMDs. Not yours.
You are saying that what Intel did with their compiler is perfectly legitimate. I don't see how you can spin that as anything but defending them.
In defending the liberties of others, you're often forced to side with scum.
they are not allowed control over their own products to they extent they can harm competition in the market as they please. The only possible "issue" is whether their actions did or did not illegally harm competition.
So if I design two products (say, iTunes and an iPod) that work well together .. and then a third party comes along and designs something that works with either of them, that's okay and I get that. But if the product is then changed so the third party's products no longer work, that's always bad? It's always anticompetitive? What you're suggesting here is that not "harming the competition" is more important than a company's right to design its products to be as beneficial to use together as possible. If the company signed a legal contract stating that the third party's products would be supported, then yes -- I'd say it's illegal. But if the third party never entered into any kind of agreement, then the other is free to do whatever they damn well want with their own products.
Okay, now I'm definitely sure you don't understand the slightest bit about the technology involved. The CPU is already "unbundled" from everything to the maximum extent technically possible. They cannot "unbundle" it any further.
You're oversimplifying the issue, and then calling me an idiot? The use of generalizations does not imply that the author's understanding of the subject matter is limited. And no, they're very bundled -- I can't use an AMD processor with an Intel chipset. Motherboards are designed around the CPUs -- and while the peripherals (memory, expansion cards, etc.) may have standardized interfaces, the guts of the system does not.
If there were published standards about how CPUs connect to the mainboard, and if the mainboard's major components were made interoperable (open BIOS, SMC, all that jazz--) that would be unbundling. The bottom line here is that if these parts were interchangable -- so that you didn't have to decide on the CPU first and then the rest of the system, that would be "unbundled". That would be a more fair marketplace than what exists right now.
Now I am not getting into any more technical detail than this, because it's pointless dick-waving. We're here to debate an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with the technology!
threatening to kill someone publicly is never a good idea.
People say stupid things when they're angry. Everybody knows this, and in a normal and well-adjusted society where we calmly and rationally look at the available facts, we'd remember this. Motive and means, those are the questions nobody asks -- because when you have a zero tolerance policy you don't have to ask questions anymore. Zero tolerance policies aren't there to keep you safe -- it's there to keep the administration safe.
I often joke about sucking out people's souls, or asking friends if they'll need help moving the body of whomever they're annoyed with, or any one of a dozen other euphemisms for killing, death, destruction, mayhem, etc. Why? Because conjuring up mental imagery of the object of our anger in pain and suffering is carthetic. We bond with our friends over our mutual dislike of others -- establishing an us and a them. It's not politically vogue to acknowledge this aspect of the human condition, but it's something we all do to varying degrees and it's healthy.
If we can't laugh at ourselves as a society -- if we can't let some things go and just say "Okay, maybe that was a bit much. Let's not do that next time," then we're setting ourselves up for a very big fall. I've seen what happens when people straightjacket themselves into not showing negative emotions. They look fine, right up until they snap. And then a whole bunch of people get hurt (or even killed) because today was the day they decided to make their own personal, Custerian stand against the world over some stupid, minor thing.
And the really sad part about it is -- when people do snap, we demonize them. They were sick and twisted individuals, and absolutely nothing like you and I. Bullshit -- they were exactly like you and me. They just couldn't take it anymore, whereas you and I, we're willing to keep our heads down, smile, and pretend nothing at all is wrong. And die a little inside each day for it. We're all victims in this. All of us.
What the fuck is it that you american's live in such state of paranoia?
Relentless public announcements that we should accept our neighbor and be considerate of each other's differences. It's to the point now where people can't even make self-deprecating comments about their own race or sex without being fired for being racist or sexist. Jokes have become illegal. We've made negative feelings essentially taboo -- you can't express anger, dissatisfaction, or anything but sunshine and kittens.
The laws of thermodynamics also loosely apply to social problems: In this case, the rate at which negative emotions are created hasn't changed, but the available space they exist within has been constrained. This has led to a rise in pressure and temperature. Naturally, leaks develop, which result in high pressure discharges into the relative vaccum of positive emotions, which are suspiciously absent right now due to an economic turndown, a lack of socialization amongst our peers (due to the constant fear of them), and so yeah...
We've made it illegal to cry tears, and so... some have started to cry bullets. I'm sorry to say, America -- but life is shit. We need to square with that and be honest. A few more fuck you's and honest brawls between people would do us all a lot of good. Yes, I'm advocating violence here -- because a few punches in the face is a lot easier to get over than a few bullets in the back.
Morticians have a morbid sense of humor? SAY IT AIN'T SO! *face palm*
The optimizations would have worked, and Intel had the compiler deliberately not apply them.
So Intel should be required to test out their competitors products for compatibility with these optimizations, as well as its own products? Should Microsoft be required to design Windows so that it's compatible with Norton Antivirus -- or is it the other way around? This compiler was designed by Intel, for Intel. That's the bottom line: If they don't want to support other microprocessors, why should they be compelled to? There's no guarantee that these optimizations won't fail in future versions of their competitors products in ways that can't be anticipated -- due to the fact that their microprocessors are black boxes to Intel.
I'm not defending Intel here -- for all I know, it could have been entirely motivated by greed. But that's not the issue here -- the issue is whether Intel is allowed control over its own products. I think the FTC is overstepping its boundaries. They allowed Intel to become the dominant player in the market despite inferior designs because when they were needed most, they looked the other way because the economy was doing well and the FTC was viewed as a nuisance by congress and so had little to no power. Now that the economy's tanked and Congress has (reluctantly) given them the authority to make needed changes, they're a player again. But they're making the wrong decisions, even if they're making them for the right reasons.
If you ask me, the solution is to unbundle the CPU from the rest of the system architecture. I know, it's difficult to imagine even amongst IT people because the CPU has long been the center of the system -- everything is designed around that. Well, maybe it's time for that to change. And the FTC should put its focus there -- just as we unbundled Internet Explorer from Windows -- the software, it's time to unbundle the hardware.