so really.. what's the friggin deal with the card?
The deal is that the accused denied to have ever bought those firecrackers, and that the card records show that the purchase was booked on the card. And because the purchase was just a few weeks ago, the accused could probably not have forgotten that he actually bought the crackers, which made him suspicious.
Of course his wife could have bought the firecrackers with the family card, and I don't know what the buying age is for children there. But most of the clues point to an inside job: napkins from the household, firelighter from the household...
LPMud (at last the GameDriver v2 and v3 from Lars Pensjö and v3.* from Amylaar) has a builtin firewall, there is a file ACCESS.ALLOW (in former versions ACCESS.DENY), where you can put from which addresses at which time you are accepting connections (and even put in error messages to send if the connections are refused.)
About 15 years ago we had in our little LPmud an object called/lib/country, which had a method get_location() to map the IP of the players in the LPmud to their respective geographical method. At first we were using empirical data (just asking everyone where he is from or guessing from the IP name and then building an internal table), later one (around 1996) we had an external client which queried the whois database to find the netblock owner and display the location.
If you entered "who" at any point in the game, it showed the player names of everyone together with rank and location of IP address. I think this one could be enough prior art.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!" Score: -1 100% Flamebait
The correct score (according to the world of ~1630) was "-1: Just a theory, not a fact";)
Actually Galileo Galilei (and other scientists like Johannes Kepler) were allowed to explore other concepts for the cosmos than the ptolemaian, provided they called it "a mathematical/astronomical theory" and were not talking about "proven facts". The catholic church in the 16th and 17th century was very interested in the results of the new research to improve the calendar (resulting in the reformed Gregorian calendar introduced in 1582) and the navigation, to help exploring the newly discovered worlds and baptise the people there (ok... actually to enslave the population).
Galileo Galilei got into trouble because he refrained from the "theory" and was starting to talk about "facts", which resulted in a scholar dispute between him and theologicans at the Sorbonne University and the Vatican. He never was incarcered into the dungeons of the Vatican. During his trial he stayed in the Villa Medici, because he was the Florentian Medici's court teacher at the time. It is still not clear why he was withdrawing all works he ever published at the trial, when the only thing he was accused of was calling a "theory" "fact". Being put to house arrest for the last 10 years of his life at his own house near Florence (later he was allowed to move into the city to live near his doctor) and being paid a monthly sum by the Vatican to cover his life expenses, because he had to give up teaching is a quite nice outcome of a trial where you got convicted of heresy. Other people got burned at a stake for less.
Here we have a saying (about something that was so long ago that the only knowledge one possesses comes from hearsay): "At that time I was still curd cheese in the display window." ('Damals war ich noch Quark im Schaufenster.')
According to your logic we have to thread curd cheese the same way as a human being because after some digestion and metabolism the atoms could form a human embryo.
Not really. It says: "Don't cry if we phase out the Pentium IV line. Pentium M processors will be a valid alternative, and we might even ramp them up to Pentium IV clock speeds with further increased performance."
No. First, as I already said to the other answer: There is a difference between a user's interface and an operator's interface, because they both have a different relationship to the Grid. One is a consumer, the other is supposed to keep the thing running. And secondary: Also the interfaces for the more advanced usages of the grid are fairly easy designed: sockets, plugs, cables. If you consider the complexity of your home installation and how many things you can do wrong if you don't follow the guidelines, and on the other hand look at the tools you get which make fairly sure that you can't screw up to easily, you know what a welldesigned interface is about.
There is only one way to get a plug into the socket (and if there are two ways, both are considered correct) you can use without deforming anything. You get sockets and plugs and cables only in certain predefined configurations, thus ensuring that you can't build invalid circuits without at least partly destroying your equipment. Failsafe mechanisms like grounding and fuses are builtin in a way that ensures that even in most bad cases you are not too much endangered by the health risks of currents above 40V.
So the interface design for the electric grid shows a vast amount of experience and sophisticated methods to hide the complexity growing out of the four Maxwell equations and their derivates to the normal user.
The rule is that I grew up in a land where nude bathing was considered the norm and wearing clothes was for the tourists. So I remember being at the beach at age 12 with lots of other people around, completely naked, independent of age and gender. Yes, there were complete families there, from little child up to the grand parents sitting together naked and going for a swim.
The most arousing moment for me was when I noticed that a girl didn't take off her pants. I was for at least 20mins wondering how she might have looked underneath. It never occured to me that I should have been aroused by people being naked.
Then there was a lake not far away from my parents home. When I went there the first time, it was uses half of the beach by nude swimmers, the other half by people prefering textiles around them. A year later it was a nude beach only. And this without any regularies around. It just happened.
And then I was partaking at a triathlon competition. The swimming part took place at another lake not far from my parents home. There were ropes around the changing zone and the place at the beach where the athletes entered the lake and left it after the swimming distance. The places behind the ropes were crowded by nude spectators watching intensely the neoprene-clad people fighting for a good starting position at the competition.
Lets put it like this: In it's true sence of word, all about nudity depends on how you look at it;)
KISS is a great concept, and I'm sure whoever came up with the acronym deserves a pat on the back.
But its useless in the real world. It is completely incompatible with complexity.
Not necessarily. Look at the electric grid. It's a vast, complex system with lots of things that can go wrong, hundreds of thousands of main elements and billions of outlets. But the user interface is one of the simplest one can imagine: a switch with two possible positions: 0 and 1, almost every time to find near the door in about three feet above the ground.
Also a NATting box is a router (in this special case it's a bridge, connecting exactly two networks). Everything that gets data, analyses the address information of the data and according to the address information and a list of rules forwards it to other nodes is a router. The fact that all nodes in one network are mapped to a single node in the other network doesn't change that. Some of those little devices are capable to route between several networks. Often one or several DMZ networks can be addressed, making it a fairly flexible router. No. A router doesn't need to implement BGP or OSPF to be called a router.
I remember an advertisement selling "Your Problem - Our Solution" about 20 years ago. It was so abundant and the words "Your problem" and "Our solution" were aligned somewhat strange in the design, so we were always forced to read "Our Solution - Your Problem".
Don't take me for an MPAA troll, but before you decide to rest easy on this theory, think again. Here's how it breaks down: MPAA highers Snooper; MPAA gives Snooper the right to use files (including the act of uploading) as necessary to catch file sharers; Snooper then uses BT to snoop. In the process, some files may have been uploaded, but because the MPAA expressly allowed the uploads in the context of snooping, Snooper's hands are as clean as whistle.
I don't know about U.S. law, but in Germany downloading is allowed, if the source is legal (the official wording is: Not obviously illegally manufactured source: UrhG Chapter 53 (1) "(1) Zulässig sind einzelne Vervielfältigungen eines Werkes durch eine natürliche Person zum privaten Gebrauch auf beliebigen Trägern, sofern sie weder unmittelbar noch mittelbar Erwerbszwecken dienen, soweit nicht zur Vervielfältigung eine offensichtlich rechtswidrig hergestellte Vorlage verwendet wird."). So if the Snooper has the legal right to upload the source, then all people downloading it do it rightfully. So the Snooper then would have to track the people who are not only downloading it, but laterone (in a different act) start to share it.
He was sucessfully sued because he noticed that some of his crops were immune against RoundUp, and he knowingly took those seeds to plant new crops. So Monsanto was sucessfully arguing that he knowingly took advantage from their intellectual property. This made him loose the case.
Take Newtons umpteenth law of motion "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction"
Try to construct an experiment which would disprove it.
No, your are misinterpreting something. Newtons Laws are a definition what 'force' is. You can't disprove definitions (except you find a contradiction inside the definition itself). With the law 'actio equals reactio' Newton states that force can be measured either at the acting or at the reacting point and it's meaningless to try to define which side the 'actio' is on and which side the 'reactio', because it defines 'force' in a way, that in a closed inertial system the sum of all forces is zero. This creates the scientific term 'force' rather than take the already existing term 'force' and state an additional property.
Energy is a similar scientific term that gets defined in a similar way. No, you can't prove that the sum of all energies in a closed system is constant. Rather you postulate that if at different points in time you measure different amounts for special types of energy, that the missing part has to be a different type of energy you didn't measure yet.
That's why the Laws of Thermodynamics are called 'laws'. They actually define, what Energy is.
Basicly BASF and AGFA started out as companies producing aniline (a dye) and soda. That's where the names come from:
BASF: Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik (Baden Anilin and Soda Factory) AGFA: Actiengesellschaft fuer die Fabrikation von Anilin (Corporation for Anilin Production)
Both were founded in the 19th century, BASF in 1865, AGFA in 1867. While BASF was founded and is still headquartered in Ludwigshafen at the Rhine, AGFA was first founded in Rummelsburg near Berlin, moved later to Wolfen and after World War II split between the east german ORWO ("Original Wolfen", Wolfen is at east german territory) and the west german AGFA (which retained the trademark rights).
Hm... setting up my HP LaserJet with Linux was easy (Start print-config, give connection type JetDirect, enter IP address, choose "Postscript printing". Ready). Setting it up with Solaris was more tedious, but doable. (Go to HP website, search for "HP LaserJet Solaris", download software, read README, run config.)
What really took me about three days was getting the HP running with Windows 2000. Windows 2000 natively doesn't know any JetDirect, and if you go to HP's website, you find a java based tool, which tries to load software from a webpage which no longer seems to exist. In the end I went and bought a parallel cable to have the printer running, which slows printing quite down. After some telnetting around into the printer itself I fiddled around with some configs, and finally it ran also over Ethernet.
So for professional printing equipment give me Linux or Solaris any day. I might have done more easily with Windows, but, you know... I am new to Windows Admin stuff, and it is not really intuitive for me.
2. lack of understanding - why do I need one company to have my login and password to use on all these sites when I, Joe Average, already use the same login and password on all these sites?
I think this covers about 95% of all arguments which don't include the pure ignorance of Passport. Joe Average User doesn't even know that he has with registering to MSN Messenger or Hotmail a kind of universal login which also works for eBay and other Passport affiliated sites. So he chooses j.a.user everytime he has to register a user.
No. The Silesian Knight Army was defeated by the Mongols at Legnica. It was just that the message of the death of Djengis Khan had arrived at the mongolian army at this time (even though Djengis Chan was dead already for 14 years), so the mongol leaders decided to go back to honor the grave of the great Khan (not so important) and secure their part of the heritage (probably the real reason for the retreat).
Did I say something which you felt insulted you? If yes, I beg for pardon. A good introducory documentation about the fossil trace for ancient mammals is at the BBC. You may also start by just entering some of the names of sabretooth cats I mentioned into your favourite search engine and read further. BlueLion has pictures of some nice feline fossils, starting at the oldest one, hoplophoneus, of about 55 mio years age until the last ones to die out (megantereon, smilodon, both dying out during the last Ice Age). If you rather prefer a book, check out "The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives" by Alan Turner.
Will the Call-A-Bikes become more impenetrable, as Darwinian geek theory dictates they'll need for survival?
Darwinian geek theory does more than call for an adaption to a certain threat. Darwinian geek theory requires, that the bicycle still remains usable for its primary usage: Being used for a short bicycle ride.
You know the sabretooth tiger (smilodon, megantereon, machairodus, hoplophoneus et.al.)? The long teeth were an adaption to the changes in the primary prey of this tiger: A large cowlike grassing animal. Because the main type of attack of the tiger was to jump for the throat or neck of the cowlike animal, this started to get thicker and thicker leathery skin around the neck and on the back. So the tiger got longer and longer teeth to penetrate the skin. At the end the cow-animal had real neck and back shields, and the sabre tooth tiger had the two feet long teeth it is known for. But now comes the catch: The neck and back shields made the cow-animal slow and heavy and was hindering it while grassing (the neck shouldn't grow too long because this would give a larger attack area to the tiger). At the same time the head of the tiger grew heavier and heavier, he finally couldn't even close his mouth anymore and all his physical energy was used up to carry the long teeth around, it got slower, more clumsy and probably also more prune to breaks of the bones and teeth (many fossils show healed breaks). When their prey vanished, the teeth were useless for any other type of prey. In the end both, predator and prey died out, killed by the overwhelming mechanisms for attack and protection. When did it happen? According to the fossils at least three times in the last 20 mio years! Three times the tigers got larger teeth to better catch and kill cowlike animals, and three times the prey answered by growing protective shields, and three times this got out of bounds, and both died out.
PS: Yes, I know. Smilodon, Dinofelis and the other sabretoothed animals were no tigers (of the genus panthera), so a more correct naming would be "sabretooth cat".
And, the SPARC family never had enough market-share, and design and manufacturing capacity to stay on the Moore's Law curve and so started slipping behind just as soon as AMD and Intel moved over to using RISC-techniques, rather than CISC-techniques, to design their x86 CPU cores
So that means about 15 years ago? The 80386 was the last full CISC processor in the x86 line. The 80486 already had a i860 derived RISC core with a microcode interpreter to process the x86 commands.
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I might give you "Small Gods" by Terry Pratchett as a good account for Godly Evolution:)
Slashdot Mirror
The deal is that the accused denied to have ever bought those firecrackers, and that the card records show that the purchase was booked on the card. And because the purchase was just a few weeks ago, the accused could probably not have forgotten that he actually bought the crackers, which made him suspicious.
Of course his wife could have bought the firecrackers with the family card, and I don't know what the buying age is for children there. But most of the clues point to an inside job: napkins from the household, firelighter from the household...
LPMud (at last the GameDriver v2 and v3 from Lars Pensjö and v3.* from Amylaar) has a builtin firewall, there is a file ACCESS.ALLOW (in former versions ACCESS.DENY), where you can put from which addresses at which time you are accepting connections (and even put in error messages to send if the connections are refused.)
About 15 years ago we had in our little LPmud an object called /lib/country, which had a method get_location() to map the IP of the players in the LPmud to their respective geographical method. At first we were using empirical data (just asking everyone where he is from or guessing from the IP name and then building an internal table), later one (around 1996) we had an external client which queried the whois database to find the netblock owner and display the location.
If you entered "who" at any point in the game, it showed the player names of everyone together with rank and location of IP address. I think this one could be enough prior art.
The correct score (according to the world of ~1630) was "-1: Just a theory, not a fact"
Actually Galileo Galilei (and other scientists like Johannes Kepler) were allowed to explore other concepts for the cosmos than the ptolemaian, provided they called it "a mathematical/astronomical theory" and were not talking about "proven facts".
The catholic church in the 16th and 17th century was very interested in the results of the new research to improve the calendar (resulting in the reformed Gregorian calendar introduced in 1582) and the navigation, to help exploring the newly discovered worlds and baptise the people there (ok... actually to enslave the population).
Galileo Galilei got into trouble because he refrained from the "theory" and was starting to talk about "facts", which resulted in a scholar dispute between him and theologicans at the Sorbonne University and the Vatican. He never was incarcered into the dungeons of the Vatican. During his trial he stayed in the Villa Medici, because he was the Florentian Medici's court teacher at the time. It is still not clear why he was withdrawing all works he ever published at the trial, when the only thing he was accused of was calling a "theory" "fact". Being put to house arrest for the last 10 years of his life at his own house near Florence (later he was allowed to move into the city to live near his doctor) and being paid a monthly sum by the Vatican to cover his life expenses, because he had to give up teaching is a quite nice outcome of a trial where you got convicted of heresy. Other people got burned at a stake for less.
Here we have a saying (about something that was so long ago that the only knowledge one possesses comes from hearsay): "At that time I was still curd cheese in the display window." ('Damals war ich noch Quark im Schaufenster.')
According to your logic we have to thread curd cheese the same way as a human being because after some digestion and metabolism the atoms could form a human embryo.
Not really. It says: "Don't cry if we phase out the Pentium IV line. Pentium M processors will be a valid alternative, and we might even ramp them up to Pentium IV clock speeds with further increased performance."
You applaud to exactly that entity that has drawn the law in the first place (and then the parliament ratified it.)
No. First, as I already said to the other answer: There is a difference between a user's interface and an operator's interface, because they both have a different relationship to the Grid. One is a consumer, the other is supposed to keep the thing running. And secondary: Also the interfaces for the more advanced usages of the grid are fairly easy designed: sockets, plugs, cables. If you consider the complexity of your home installation and how many things you can do wrong if you don't follow the guidelines, and on the other hand look at the tools you get which make fairly sure that you can't screw up to easily, you know what a welldesigned interface is about.
There is only one way to get a plug into the socket (and if there are two ways, both are considered correct) you can use without deforming anything. You get sockets and plugs and cables only in certain predefined configurations, thus ensuring that you can't build invalid circuits without at least partly destroying your equipment. Failsafe mechanisms like grounding and fuses are builtin in a way that ensures that even in most bad cases you are not too much endangered by the health risks of currents above 40V.
So the interface design for the electric grid shows a vast amount of experience and sophisticated methods to hide the complexity growing out of the four Maxwell equations and their derivates to the normal user.
That's the operator's interface, not that for the users.
The rule is that I grew up in a land where nude bathing was considered the norm and wearing clothes was for the tourists. So I remember being at the beach at age 12 with lots of other people around, completely naked, independent of age and gender. Yes, there were complete families there, from little child up to the grand parents sitting together naked and going for a swim.
;)
The most arousing moment for me was when I noticed that a girl didn't take off her pants. I was for at least 20mins wondering how she might have looked underneath. It never occured to me that I should have been aroused by people being naked.
Then there was a lake not far away from my parents home. When I went there the first time, it was uses half of the beach by nude swimmers, the other half by people prefering textiles around them. A year later it was a nude beach only. And this without any regularies around. It just happened.
And then I was partaking at a triathlon competition. The swimming part took place at another lake not far from my parents home. There were ropes around the changing zone and the place at the beach where the athletes entered the lake and left it after the swimming distance. The places behind the ropes were crowded by nude spectators watching intensely the neoprene-clad people fighting for a good starting position at the competition.
Lets put it like this: In it's true sence of word, all about nudity depends on how you look at it
KISS is a great concept, and I'm sure whoever came up with the acronym deserves a pat on the back.
But its useless in the real world. It is completely incompatible with complexity.
Not necessarily. Look at the electric grid. It's a vast, complex system with lots of things that can go wrong, hundreds of thousands of main elements and billions of outlets. But the user interface is one of the simplest one can imagine: a switch with two possible positions: 0 and 1, almost every time to find near the door in about three feet above the ground.
Also a NATting box is a router (in this special case it's a bridge, connecting exactly two networks). Everything that gets data, analyses the address information of the data and according to the address information and a list of rules forwards it to other nodes is a router. The fact that all nodes in one network are mapped to a single node in the other network doesn't change that.
Some of those little devices are capable to route between several networks. Often one or several DMZ networks can be addressed, making it a fairly flexible router.
No. A router doesn't need to implement BGP or OSPF to be called a router.
I remember an advertisement selling "Your Problem - Our Solution" about 20 years ago. It was so abundant and the words "Your problem" and "Our solution" were aligned somewhat strange in the design, so we were always forced to read "Our Solution - Your Problem".
I don't know about U.S. law, but in Germany downloading is allowed, if the source is legal (the official wording is: Not obviously illegally manufactured source: UrhG Chapter 53 (1) "(1) Zulässig sind einzelne Vervielfältigungen eines Werkes durch eine natürliche Person zum privaten Gebrauch auf beliebigen Trägern, sofern sie weder unmittelbar noch mittelbar Erwerbszwecken dienen, soweit nicht zur Vervielfältigung eine offensichtlich rechtswidrig hergestellte Vorlage verwendet wird."). So if the Snooper has the legal right to upload the source, then all people downloading it do it rightfully. So the Snooper then would have to track the people who are not only downloading it, but laterone (in a different act) start to share it.
He was sucessfully sued because he noticed that some of his crops were immune against RoundUp, and he knowingly took those seeds to plant new crops. So Monsanto was sucessfully arguing that he knowingly took advantage from their intellectual property. This made him loose the case.
No, your are misinterpreting something. Newtons Laws are a definition what 'force' is. You can't disprove definitions (except you find a contradiction inside the definition itself). With the law 'actio equals reactio' Newton states that force can be measured either at the acting or at the reacting point and it's meaningless to try to define which side the 'actio' is on and which side the 'reactio', because it defines 'force' in a way, that in a closed inertial system the sum of all forces is zero. This creates the scientific term 'force' rather than take the already existing term 'force' and state an additional property.
Energy is a similar scientific term that gets defined in a similar way. No, you can't prove that the sum of all energies in a closed system is constant. Rather you postulate that if at different points in time you measure different amounts for special types of energy, that the missing part has to be a different type of energy you didn't measure yet.
That's why the Laws of Thermodynamics are called 'laws'. They actually define, what Energy is.
Basicly BASF and AGFA started out as companies producing aniline (a dye) and soda. That's where the names come from:
BASF: Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik (Baden Anilin and Soda Factory)
AGFA: Actiengesellschaft fuer die Fabrikation von Anilin (Corporation for Anilin Production)
Both were founded in the 19th century, BASF in 1865, AGFA in 1867. While BASF was founded and is still headquartered in Ludwigshafen at the Rhine, AGFA was first founded in Rummelsburg near Berlin, moved later to Wolfen and after World War II split between the east german ORWO ("Original Wolfen", Wolfen is at east german territory) and the west german AGFA (which retained the trademark rights).
Hm... setting up my HP LaserJet with Linux was easy (Start print-config, give connection type JetDirect, enter IP address, choose "Postscript printing". Ready).
Setting it up with Solaris was more tedious, but doable. (Go to HP website, search for "HP LaserJet Solaris", download software, read README, run config.)
What really took me about three days was getting the HP running with Windows 2000. Windows 2000 natively doesn't know any JetDirect, and if you go to HP's website, you find a java based tool, which tries to load software from a webpage which no longer seems to exist. In the end I went and bought a parallel cable to have the printer running, which slows printing quite down. After some telnetting around into the printer itself I fiddled around with some configs, and finally it ran also over Ethernet.
So for professional printing equipment give me Linux or Solaris any day. I might have done more easily with Windows, but, you know... I am new to Windows Admin stuff, and it is not really intuitive for me.
No wonder if Passport gets discontinued ;) That's the whole point of the article.
I think this covers about 95% of all arguments which don't include the pure ignorance of Passport.
Joe Average User doesn't even know that he has with registering to MSN Messenger or Hotmail a kind of universal login which also works for eBay and other Passport affiliated sites. So he chooses j.a.user everytime he has to register a user.
No. The Silesian Knight Army was defeated by the Mongols at Legnica. It was just that the message of the death of Djengis Khan had arrived at the mongolian army at this time (even though Djengis Chan was dead already for 14 years), so the mongol leaders decided to go back to honor the grave of the great Khan (not so important) and secure their part of the heritage (probably the real reason for the retreat).
Did I say something which you felt insulted you? If yes, I beg for pardon.
A good introducory documentation about the fossil trace for ancient mammals is at the BBC. You may also start by just entering some of the names of sabretooth cats I mentioned into your favourite search engine and read further. BlueLion has pictures of some nice feline fossils, starting at the oldest one, hoplophoneus , of about 55 mio years age until the last ones to die out ( megantereon , smilodon , both dying out during the last Ice Age).
If you rather prefer a book, check out "The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives" by Alan Turner.
Will the Call-A-Bikes become more impenetrable, as Darwinian geek theory dictates they'll need for survival?
Darwinian geek theory does more than call for an adaption to a certain threat. Darwinian geek theory requires, that the bicycle still remains usable for its primary usage: Being used for a short bicycle ride.
You know the sabretooth tiger (smilodon, megantereon, machairodus, hoplophoneus et.al.)? The long teeth were an adaption to the changes in the primary prey of this tiger: A large cowlike grassing animal. Because the main type of attack of the tiger was to jump for the throat or neck of the cowlike animal, this started to get thicker and thicker leathery skin around the neck and on the back. So the tiger got longer and longer teeth to penetrate the skin. At the end the cow-animal had real neck and back shields, and the sabre tooth tiger had the two feet long teeth it is known for.
But now comes the catch: The neck and back shields made the cow-animal slow and heavy and was hindering it while grassing (the neck shouldn't grow too long because this would give a larger attack area to the tiger). At the same time the head of the tiger grew heavier and heavier, he finally couldn't even close his mouth anymore and all his physical energy was used up to carry the long teeth around, it got slower, more clumsy and probably also more prune to breaks of the bones and teeth (many fossils show healed breaks). When their prey vanished, the teeth were useless for any other type of prey.
In the end both, predator and prey died out, killed by the overwhelming mechanisms for attack and protection. When did it happen? According to the fossils at least three times in the last 20 mio years! Three times the tigers got larger teeth to better catch and kill cowlike animals, and three times the prey answered by growing protective shields, and three times this got out of bounds, and both died out.
PS: Yes, I know. Smilodon, Dinofelis and the other sabretoothed animals were no tigers (of the genus panthera), so a more correct naming would be "sabretooth cat".
And, the SPARC family never had enough market-share, and design and manufacturing capacity to stay on the Moore's Law curve and so started slipping behind just as soon as AMD and Intel moved over to using RISC-techniques, rather than CISC-techniques, to design their x86 CPU cores
So that means about 15 years ago? The 80386 was the last full CISC processor in the x86 line. The 80486 already had a i860 derived RISC core with a microcode interpreter to process the x86 commands.
I might give you "Small Gods" by Terry Pratchett as a good account for Godly Evolution :)