Interestingly though the TU 144 super sonic jet was in operations one year early than the Concorde. After all it must have been a horrendous night of plan debugging at the Tupolev construction office...
The allegation that the TU 144 is a Concorde clone is easily to be contradicted by the actual timeline. The clone was up and running before the original.
As someone coming from behind the Iron Curtain, I can assure you that the -3/ is actually correct. The soviet engineers cloned processors down to the microscopic scale. There have even been clones of Intel processors with the (c) Intel part right on the silicon! You can bet that the pipeline system was cloned down to the single valve.
In the late Eighties the former GDR (East Germany) cloned the VAX processors and an 1Mbit memory chip to build VAX clones. If you can get hold of an official report of the '89 Leipzig spring trade fair (Leipziger Fruehjahrsmesse), you will note all that bragging about the 32bit processor and the 1Mbit RAM. In some not so tech savvy newspapers they even messed it up and talked about the 32bit memory chip;)
As a pupil at an GDR public school I was working on a small scientific project, and I was typing my report on an A7100 computer, which was basicly a CP/M clone featuring an U880 CPU (Z80 clone). Some series of the A7100 had even original Z80s built in, if the GDR could get hold of them. I used the textprocessor (command: tp), and WordStar came up. There was the REDABAS relational Database system (dBaseII), and TurboPascal 3.0 as development environment. One of the first actions Borland made after the fall of the Berlin wall was to legalize all the TurboPascal 3.0 clones installed in schools and offices throughout the GDR.
In the Rossendorf Nuclear Research facility the two main process computers were actual Commodore AMIGA 2000 computers, bought for an insane amount of money (about 120,000 east german Mark, about 10 times a year's net salary for the average East german) from the east german tax authorities, which probably confiscated them at the inner german border as contrabande.
Most cars built behind the Iron courtain had west european roots. The russian Lada cars were licensed FIAT 123, modified in later series. The russian Moskvich, Volga and Pobeda brands were derived from GM Opel Kapitaen or GM Opel Rekord projects. In Poland the FIAT 125 and FIAT 126 were built as Polski FIAT, and the Pobeda was still produced as Warszawa. The romanian Dacia cars were in fact licensed Renault 12, and the Olcit compact was a Citroen Visa. The FIAT 128 was built in Yugoslavia as Zastava (in the plant which later created the Yugo!), and the east german Wartburg came from a Renault built assembly line (even though the construction based on the pre-WWII DKW Meisterklasse).
(Interestingly though the czech brands Skoda and Tatra were genuine czech products...)
If someone tells you that something behind the Iron Curtain was cloned from a western product, better believe it was cloned down to the last screw. Don't expect any incompatibilities;)
Now, after it is completely offtopic, I am not afraid of infection. It's more about being exposed to the same combination of chemicals all the time increases your risk of getting whatever illness is en vogue at the time (cancer, allergies, metabolic illness). Almost all problems with food, cleaners, toxic incredients and other things in the household affect the people most who are constantly exposed to it. And dangerously low levels of a chemical also happens more easily if you are using only a very small subset of available products.
Basicly I am just trying to keep the dose of everything as low as possible while not missing anything that is important for my metabolism. There is no class of chemicals that is not proven to be dangerous to the health if you get high doses of it for a long time. And on the contrary: There are lots of studies indicating that not getting most of the poisons at a very low level is bad for your health too, which is old news, as Paracelsus already stated in the Middle Age: It's the dose that makes the poison. So try to get a sensible mix of it.:) Every diet, every concentration of only one proven brand increases certain chemicals and lowers others, which may be antidotes for the poisonous effects.
The third point has been kept in the new contracts but nobody expects it to hold up in court, at least not here in Europe. Although the poor bastard who the company decides to honor by testing that clause on is probably going to have to shell out a small fortune in legal fees to prove them wrong and employees will probably think twice beore signing the new contract.
It will be considerably cheap. Because of the right to choose your place of work freely (as laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights), the third clause is void anyway. The only legal lever the company could pull is to sue the futural employer for unfair competition if it can prove that said futural employer hired you to gather information about your current employer. They don't have anything to enforce the clause on YOU.
Of course a potential new employer may be afraid to hire you because it may look as if he tries to espionage your current company, but the most famous case in that direction (Ignacio Lopez leaving GM to join Volkswagen) finally ended without conviction of Volkswagen.
I beg to differ. Everytime I have to buy new tooth paste I buy a different brand, and if I manage it, produced at a different company. If some study will come up with a serious flaw in the tooth paste of one brand, I am not as exposed to the risk as if I would use only this brand.
Same goes for nearly everthing I buy. I try to choose other offerings every time I have the chance to. And yes. The car I am currently driving is of a different make (even from a different corporation) than the one I owned before.
Just look at the actual agreement: Univention, the other part of the agreement, represents Linux users and developers except SCO. So the agreement doesn't cover users and developers of SCO's Linux offerings (Caldera and SCO Linux).
The agreement just says that if SCO Group GmbH started to ask their own customers for an US$699 additional license, Univention doesn't bother. If SCO Group GmbH goes against people and companies represented by Univention, the 10000 Euro clause in the agreement holds.
A) It was not the gouvernment telling SCO to shut up.
B) It was not an order to shut up, it was a signed agreement between SCO and Univention representing Linux companies and users.
C) This is a contract, nothing else, and SCO Group GmbH as the german part of SCO is allowed to sign any contract they like (if it displeases the SCO head quarter they can still fire the german CEO).
D) If SCO Group GmbH would have acted as the official voice of SCO in Germany, they would have been liable for damages caused by unfair competition. From the german point of view SCOs claims against IBM look unfounded and only used to deprive Linux companies of their business, because there hasn't been any hard evidence for an actual copyrigth infringment yet, and breach of contract between SCO (U.S.) and IBM (U.S.) shouldn't affect german users of Linux.
E) So it was a wise move for the german SCO branch to keep out of the SCO game in U.S. until either facts are established or SCO takes another turn. With the contract in hand the german SCO branch can tell their U.S. headquarters why they don't risk the SCO game in Germany: Because it's to expensive. 10000 Euros per statement. This is understandable even to SCO in Utah.
Anything a robot can do, an astronaut in a space suit can do BETTER by several orders of magnitude.
I doubt that.
First: No astronaut likes to take 10000 examples and analyses them 10000 times. A robot doesn't complain. A robot doesn't get tired. A human does.
Second: A robot can be build adapted to the martian surface: A third the weight for the same mass, no breathable air, sandy environment... For a human, you have to put lots of technology into the space suit to adapt to the martian environment, and the astronaut is occupied carrying it around instead of performing experiments. And working in a space suit is not as easy as just with a labor suit.
Third: A robot can have everything builtin needed to perform analysis. You can design everthing in a size fit to the experiment you are planning. For a man you have to have everthing in the size a human needs it to handle. A human may not be able to perform all experiments during the walk outside, she has to carry her martian examples into the space station and work in the lab, which takes much longer.
The only thing humans are better than robot is to react at unexpected situations. But since the experiments are already preplanned on earth and the space ship is designed for and loaded with the equipment for exactly those experiments, humans don't have much chance to adapt to unexpected situations. What unexpected situations anyway? Suddenly a martian jumping at people? Basicly there are two types of unexpected situations a human could be forced to react on: a) something dangerous happens. Then be glad you just loose a robot. b) there is a chance to analyse something you didn't expect to be there. Then the human doesn't have the equipment to analyse either (and because we don't send McGuyver, he can't built it out of martian dirt). And there is still the earth station, and most of the robots are reprogrammable and remotely guidable anyway, so you may be able to adapt the experiment to the new situation.
With the ESA Beagle we had a situation where a human being around may have helped. She could just take the beagle probe and turn it back on after it failed somehow. But it's much cheaper to just send a second beagle probe to Mars than to send and bring back a human being.
Yahoo never was a search engine in the pure sense of word. Yahoo started out as a browsable catalogue of the Web, where every entry was put into categories by hand. The automated search came later and was bought as service from external providers up until now.
Your view of Europe is slightly wrong too. Run a hosting service in Germany? one of your users wants to post the original words to "Deutschland Uber Alles"?
You both will go to jail. Nevermind if there is a swastika in there, then you will go to jail for a very long time. Confiscation of your equipment will be the least of your concerns.
Wrong. You both may face (under weird circumstances) a criminal prosecution. But it doesn't mean you will go to jail. An ISP has to remove postings with hate speech in a timely manner if he gets aware of it, either being notified by someone or by seeing it himself. If he can prove that he acted accordingly, he will go free.
And even if the court finds that the ISP neglected his duty to go after hate speech and remove it from its servers, he will not go to jail, but be released under probation.
On the other hand: Posting the wording of "Deutschland ber alles" is no criminal offense in Germany at all. It may give some fuss because so called "Gutmenschen" (literally "good men", zealots of the "one and only good") are calling you a host for revisionism and facsism, but the investigation will probably be stopped because of "missing public interest to prosecute". The wording of "Deutschland ber alles" doesn't fall under "glorification of symbols of organizations against the constitution" (Verherrlichung der Symbole verfassungsfeindlicher Organisationen), you will find the lyrics in several song books freely available. The third verse is still the national anthem of Germany.
Taking power from radiowaves actually changes the electromagnetic fields and weakens it the suroundings. To compensate the sender has to increase its power. It's something called 'principle of conservation of energy'.
This is called 'energy theft' in Germany and thus forbidden. I have old (60ties) issues of a "youth and technology" (Jugend & Technik) magazine, where they had circuit plans for an AM radio with 'local radio powering' (Ortssenderspeisung), as it was called back then, when it wasn't forbidden.
In some public places like churches and music halls were special induction loops to power the hearing aids of accoustically challenged people, working on the same principle.
1. Intel chipsets had USB builtin since the days of USB 1.0, thus for about half of the sold motherboards (those with Intel chipset), USB was just there without additional cost. Firewire required extra hardware until non-Intel chipset designers started to put it into their products.
2. Firewire uses an own controller design to handle the protocol, making the chip design to support Firewire more complex. USB does a lot of work in the software USB driver, thus making for a more simple chip design or an easier integration of USB into the I/O part of the chipset (mostly in the southbridge).
This basicly covers also the pros and contras for USB and Firewire.
USB is cheaply to implement in hardware, and you can add functionality later in the driver. So USB-support for non-commodity platforms is more complex, because you have to write more complex drivers. USB transfer rate is coupled with system load, a loaded system can't keep the full transfer rate, and USB transfers in reverse generate considerable system load at higher rates.
Firewire is more complex to do in hardware, but once it is implemented, the drivers are quite straight forward and generic and thus easily implementable on different platforms. Protocol extensions will break backward compatibility though or require at least a software compatibility layer to run also on older hardware. But firewire transfers are not coupled with the system throughput and can run with high rates on highly loaded systems or slow CPUs.
The timeline for the Itanium processors was unlucky. When the first roadmap for the Itanium was put up (around 1997), AMD's K7 was not even on the horizon. At this time a 800-1000 MHz 64bit processor looked good for the next 10 years. Suns UltraSparc II was at 150 MHz at this time, PowerPC about the same range, and the topselling PC processors were at 200 MHz. It was slowly growing up to 500MHz with the P3, and the other architectures maxed out somewhere at 450 MHz. Then suddenly AMD came and put up the first 1GHz processor, and a race started between Athlons and the P3s, leaving everything behind in core frequency. Eventually the 800MHz of the Itanium didn't look that impressive anymore.
Intels P4 was poised to gain the frequency crown, and it made the Itanium look even worse (though it was not true performancewise), and you could buy Xeon III with 933MHz cores, good enough for most business servers with their large caches, with sophisticated chipsets for SMP, and with OS support for clustering. So Itanium suddenly was only a processor for numeric applications, because Intel had to fight AMD in the bread-and-butter PC business.
The Itanium II is still an impressive processor with its number crunching abilities and its integer performance. But it's cheaper for most people just to throw more P4 Xeons at the same problem, because the underlying technology has been implemented in millions of systems. Tightly packed blade servers are mostly based on P4 architectures, and increased redundancy by having more processors and systems clustered can't be easily beaten by less processor cores for more processing power.
The processor race between Intel and AMD has cannibalized the possible markets for the Itanium, and the number of fields, where Itanium make sense from a price/performance ratio are getting smaller.
With the upcoming of AMD's x86-64 even the More Address Space argument is looking weak, because you can get the same with AMD's architecture, which seems to have the smoother migration path due to its outstanding x86-32 performance. Again less business cases for Itanium.
So were are the application Itanium fits best in, if the alternative is to take a blade server with twice the numbers of P4 processors running at top speed? Or get an SMP Opteron system, which is cheaper, more widely available and seems to have the better OS support?
No, sorry, but an OS is responsible for the interaction between a human and a machine, and nothing else.
In my operating systems lesson I learned it differently: An operating system administers the limited ressources (CPU time, IRQ slots, memory, I/O...) and protects different tasks running on the same hardware against each other.
Interaction with the user is often done by other means. A server typically has no users, which interact with it, it has clients requesting services.
As far as I know, AMD has also much more than desktop CPUs. They have flash RAM, they have embedded controllers (anyone remember the AMD29K series?). Without those other product lines they wouldn't have survived the times when they were struggling to get the new desktop processors out.
It was the basic software for two mortgage banks. There are not many banks out there, so the target group was rather small. The software project was already going for about 7 years when I joined, and it was still running when I left two years later. The initial price tag was $90,000,000 though, but with all the changes and later addons it tripled somewhere.
The main problem with ternary computing is that it can be directly mapped onto binary computing. So it doesn't change the set of problems we can attack with computing, it just changes the way. But the conversation between binary and ternary logic can be done automatically.
I know of no class of problems in computer science that can be better addressed by ternary computing than by binary computing. There may be some of them out there. But in general ternary computing doesn't change enough to have an impact.
Just because something is open in the public doesn't waive the copyrights. CNN can be watched by approximately 2 billion people everyday, and the news still have the (c)CNN thingy.
It works the other way around: Copyright was made to allow you to publish something without fearing that now everyone can copy and use it.
We had exactly two customers, and the price tag for the software was $275,000,000. (Yes... all the nine numbers...). Not what I would call 'boxed software'.
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Interestingly though the TU 144 super sonic jet was in operations one year early than the Concorde. After all it must have been a horrendous night of plan debugging at the Tupolev construction office...
The allegation that the TU 144 is a Concorde clone is easily to be contradicted by the actual timeline. The clone was up and running before the original.
As someone coming from behind the Iron Curtain, I can assure you that the -3/ is actually correct. The soviet engineers cloned processors down to the microscopic scale. There have even been clones of Intel processors with the (c) Intel part right on the silicon! You can bet that the pipeline system was cloned down to the single valve.
;)
;)
In the late Eighties the former GDR (East Germany) cloned the VAX processors and an 1Mbit memory chip to build VAX clones. If you can get hold of an official report of the '89 Leipzig spring trade fair (Leipziger Fruehjahrsmesse), you will note all that bragging about the 32bit processor and the 1Mbit RAM. In some not so tech savvy newspapers they even messed it up and talked about the 32bit memory chip
As a pupil at an GDR public school I was working on a small scientific project, and I was typing my report on an A7100 computer, which was basicly a CP/M clone featuring an U880 CPU (Z80 clone). Some series of the A7100 had even original Z80s built in, if the GDR could get hold of them. I used the textprocessor (command: tp), and WordStar came up. There was the REDABAS relational Database system (dBaseII), and TurboPascal 3.0 as development environment. One of the first actions Borland made after the fall of the Berlin wall was to legalize all the TurboPascal 3.0 clones installed in schools and offices throughout the GDR.
In the Rossendorf Nuclear Research facility the two main process computers were actual Commodore AMIGA 2000 computers, bought for an insane amount of money (about 120,000 east german Mark, about 10 times a year's net salary for the average East german) from the east german tax authorities, which probably confiscated them at the inner german border as contrabande.
Most cars built behind the Iron courtain had west european roots. The russian Lada cars were licensed FIAT 123, modified in later series. The russian Moskvich, Volga and Pobeda brands were derived from GM Opel Kapitaen or GM Opel Rekord projects. In Poland the FIAT 125 and FIAT 126 were built as Polski FIAT, and the Pobeda was still produced as Warszawa. The romanian Dacia cars were in fact licensed Renault 12, and the Olcit compact was a Citroen Visa. The FIAT 128 was built in Yugoslavia as Zastava (in the plant which later created the Yugo!), and the east german Wartburg came from a Renault built assembly line (even though the construction based on the pre-WWII DKW Meisterklasse).
(Interestingly though the czech brands Skoda and Tatra were genuine czech products...)
If someone tells you that something behind the Iron Curtain was cloned from a western product, better believe it was cloned down to the last screw. Don't expect any incompatibilities
Now, after it is completely offtopic, I am not afraid of infection. It's more about being exposed to the same combination of chemicals all the time increases your risk of getting whatever illness is en vogue at the time (cancer, allergies, metabolic illness). Almost all problems with food, cleaners, toxic incredients and other things in the household affect the people most who are constantly exposed to it. And dangerously low levels of a chemical also happens more easily if you are using only a very small subset of available products.
:) Every diet, every concentration of only one proven brand increases certain chemicals and lowers others, which may be antidotes for the poisonous effects.
Basicly I am just trying to keep the dose of everything as low as possible while not missing anything that is important for my metabolism. There is no class of chemicals that is not proven to be dangerous to the health if you get high doses of it for a long time. And on the contrary: There are lots of studies indicating that not getting most of the poisons at a very low level is bad for your health too, which is old news, as Paracelsus already stated in the Middle Age: It's the dose that makes the poison. So try to get a sensible mix of it.
The third point has been kept in the new contracts but nobody expects it to hold up in court, at least not here in Europe. Although the poor bastard who the company decides to honor by testing that clause on is probably going to have to shell out a small fortune in legal fees to prove them wrong and employees will probably think twice beore signing the new contract.
It will be considerably cheap. Because of the right to choose your place of work freely (as laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights), the third clause is void anyway. The only legal lever the company could pull is to sue the futural employer for unfair competition if it can prove that said futural employer hired you to gather information about your current employer. They don't have anything to enforce the clause on YOU.
Of course a potential new employer may be afraid to hire you because it may look as if he tries to espionage your current company, but the most famous case in that direction (Ignacio Lopez leaving GM to join Volkswagen) finally ended without conviction of Volkswagen.
I beg to differ. Everytime I have to buy new tooth paste I buy a different brand, and if I manage it, produced at a different company. If some study will come up with a serious flaw in the tooth paste of one brand, I am not as exposed to the risk as if I would use only this brand.
Same goes for nearly everthing I buy. I try to choose other offerings every time I have the chance to. And yes. The car I am currently driving is of a different make (even from a different corporation) than the one I owned before.
Just look at the actual agreement: Univention, the other part of the agreement, represents Linux users and developers except SCO. So the agreement doesn't cover users and developers of SCO's Linux offerings (Caldera and SCO Linux).
The agreement just says that if SCO Group GmbH started to ask their own customers for an US$699 additional license, Univention doesn't bother. If SCO Group GmbH goes against people and companies represented by Univention, the 10000 Euro clause in the agreement holds.
A) It was not the gouvernment telling SCO to shut up.
B) It was not an order to shut up, it was a signed agreement between SCO and Univention representing Linux companies and users.
C) This is a contract, nothing else, and SCO Group GmbH as the german part of SCO is allowed to sign any contract they like (if it displeases the SCO head quarter they can still fire the german CEO).
D) If SCO Group GmbH would have acted as the official voice of SCO in Germany, they would have been liable for damages caused by unfair competition. From the german point of view SCOs claims against IBM look unfounded and only used to deprive Linux companies of their business, because there hasn't been any hard evidence for an actual copyrigth infringment yet, and breach of contract between SCO (U.S.) and IBM (U.S.) shouldn't affect german users of Linux.
E) So it was a wise move for the german SCO branch to keep out of the SCO game in U.S. until either facts are established or SCO takes another turn. With the contract in hand the german SCO branch can tell their U.S. headquarters why they don't risk the SCO game in Germany: Because it's to expensive. 10000 Euros per statement. This is understandable even to SCO in Utah.
Anything a robot can do, an astronaut in a space suit can do BETTER by several orders of magnitude.
I doubt that.
First: No astronaut likes to take 10000 examples and analyses them 10000 times. A robot doesn't complain. A robot doesn't get tired. A human does.
Second: A robot can be build adapted to the martian surface: A third the weight for the same mass, no breathable air, sandy environment... For a human, you have to put lots of technology into the space suit to adapt to the martian environment, and the astronaut is occupied carrying it around instead of performing experiments. And working in a space suit is not as easy as just with a labor suit.
Third: A robot can have everything builtin needed to perform analysis. You can design everthing in a size fit to the experiment you are planning. For a man you have to have everthing in the size a human needs it to handle. A human may not be able to perform all experiments during the walk outside, she has to carry her martian examples into the space station and work in the lab, which takes much longer.
The only thing humans are better than robot is to react at unexpected situations. But since the experiments are already preplanned on earth and the space ship is designed for and loaded with the equipment for exactly those experiments, humans don't have much chance to adapt to unexpected situations. What unexpected situations anyway? Suddenly a martian jumping at people? Basicly there are two types of unexpected situations a human could be forced to react on: a) something dangerous happens. Then be glad you just loose a robot. b) there is a chance to analyse something you didn't expect to be there. Then the human doesn't have the equipment to analyse either (and because we don't send McGuyver, he can't built it out of martian dirt). And there is still the earth station, and most of the robots are reprogrammable and remotely guidable anyway, so you may be able to adapt the experiment to the new situation.
With the ESA Beagle we had a situation where a human being around may have helped. She could just take the beagle probe and turn it back on after it failed somehow. But it's much cheaper to just send a second beagle probe to Mars than to send and bring back a human being.
Since 15th April 1895.
Oh, you are asking, since when Anheuser-Busch sold beer? I really don't know.
Yahoo never was a search engine in the pure sense of word. Yahoo started out as a browsable catalogue of the Web, where every entry was put into categories by hand. The automated search came later and was bought as service from external providers up until now.
Your view of Europe is slightly wrong too.
Run a hosting service in Germany? one of your users wants to post the original words to "Deutschland Uber Alles"?
You both will go to jail. Nevermind if there is a swastika in there, then you will go to jail for a very long time. Confiscation of your equipment will be the least of your concerns.
Wrong. You both may face (under weird circumstances) a criminal prosecution. But it doesn't mean you will go to jail. An ISP has to remove postings with hate speech in a timely manner if he gets aware of it, either being notified by someone or by seeing it himself. If he can prove that he acted accordingly, he will go free.
And even if the court finds that the ISP neglected his duty to go after hate speech and remove it from its servers, he will not go to jail, but be released under probation.
On the other hand: Posting the wording of "Deutschland ber alles" is no criminal offense in Germany at all. It may give some fuss because so called "Gutmenschen" (literally "good men", zealots of the "one and only good") are calling you a host for revisionism and facsism, but the investigation will probably be stopped because of "missing public interest to prosecute". The wording of "Deutschland ber alles" doesn't fall under "glorification of symbols of organizations against the constitution" (Verherrlichung der Symbole verfassungsfeindlicher Organisationen), you will find the lyrics in several song books freely available. The third verse is still the national anthem of Germany.
Taking power from radiowaves actually changes the electromagnetic fields and weakens it the suroundings. To compensate the sender has to increase its power. It's something called 'principle of conservation of energy'.
This is called 'energy theft' in Germany and thus forbidden. I have old (60ties) issues of a "youth and technology" (Jugend & Technik) magazine, where they had circuit plans for an AM radio with 'local radio powering' (Ortssenderspeisung), as it was called back then, when it wasn't forbidden.
In some public places like churches and music halls were special induction loops to power the hearing aids of accoustically challenged people, working on the same principle.
1. Intel chipsets had USB builtin since the days of USB 1.0, thus for about half of the sold motherboards (those with Intel chipset), USB was just there without additional cost. Firewire required extra hardware until non-Intel chipset designers started to put it into their products.
2. Firewire uses an own controller design to handle the protocol, making the chip design to support Firewire more complex. USB does a lot of work in the software USB driver, thus making for a more simple chip design or an easier integration of USB into the I/O part of the chipset (mostly in the southbridge).
This basicly covers also the pros and contras for USB and Firewire.
USB is cheaply to implement in hardware, and you can add functionality later in the driver. So USB-support for non-commodity platforms is more complex, because you have to write more complex drivers. USB transfer rate is coupled with system load, a loaded system can't keep the full transfer rate, and USB transfers in reverse generate considerable system load at higher rates.
Firewire is more complex to do in hardware, but once it is implemented, the drivers are quite straight forward and generic and thus easily implementable on different platforms. Protocol extensions will break backward compatibility though or require at least a software compatibility layer to run also on older hardware. But firewire transfers are not coupled with the system throughput and can run with high rates on highly loaded systems or slow CPUs.
The timeline for the Itanium processors was unlucky. When the first roadmap for the Itanium was put up (around 1997), AMD's K7 was not even on the horizon. At this time a 800-1000 MHz 64bit processor looked good for the next 10 years. Suns UltraSparc II was at 150 MHz at this time, PowerPC about the same range, and the topselling PC processors were at 200 MHz. It was slowly growing up to 500MHz with the P3, and the other architectures maxed out somewhere at 450 MHz. Then suddenly AMD came and put up the first 1GHz processor, and a race started between Athlons and the P3s, leaving everything behind in core frequency. Eventually the 800MHz of the Itanium didn't look that impressive anymore.
Intels P4 was poised to gain the frequency crown, and it made the Itanium look even worse (though it was not true performancewise), and you could buy Xeon III with 933MHz cores, good enough for most business servers with their large caches, with sophisticated chipsets for SMP, and with OS support for clustering. So Itanium suddenly was only a processor for numeric applications, because Intel had to fight AMD in the bread-and-butter PC business.
The Itanium II is still an impressive processor with its number crunching abilities and its integer performance. But it's cheaper for most people just to throw more P4 Xeons at the same problem, because the underlying technology has been implemented in millions of systems. Tightly packed blade servers are mostly based on P4 architectures, and increased redundancy by having more processors and systems clustered can't be easily beaten by less processor cores for more processing power.
The processor race between Intel and AMD has cannibalized the possible markets for the Itanium, and the number of fields, where Itanium make sense from a price/performance ratio are getting smaller.
With the upcoming of AMD's x86-64 even the More Address Space argument is looking weak, because you can get the same with AMD's architecture, which seems to have the smoother migration path due to its outstanding x86-32 performance. Again less business cases for Itanium.
So were are the application Itanium fits best in, if the alternative is to take a blade server with twice the numbers of P4 processors running at top speed? Or get an SMP Opteron system, which is cheaper, more widely available and seems to have the better OS support?
You think she isn't?!
Ten years ago we called it SGML, and XML is still fully expressable with SGML syntax.
No, sorry, but an OS is responsible for the interaction between a human and a machine, and nothing else.
In my operating systems lesson I learned it differently:
An operating system administers the limited ressources (CPU time, IRQ slots, memory, I/O...) and protects different tasks running on the same hardware against each other.
Interaction with the user is often done by other means. A server typically has no users, which interact with it, it has clients requesting services.
As far as I know, AMD has also much more than desktop CPUs. They have flash RAM, they have embedded controllers (anyone remember the AMD29K series?). Without those other product lines they wouldn't have survived the times when they were struggling to get the new desktop processors out.
It was the basic software for two mortgage banks. There are not many banks out there, so the target group was rather small. The software project was already going for about 7 years when I joined, and it was still running when I left two years later. The initial price tag was $90,000,000 though, but with all the changes and later addons it tripled somewhere.
It seemed to me that the interview was done on tape and the person who later typed it misheard it, and it slipped through the proofreading.
Interestingly though Victoria Livshits is from the former Soviet Union. What does that tell us about running gags?
The main problem with ternary computing is that it can be directly mapped onto binary computing. So it doesn't change the set of problems we can attack with computing, it just changes the way. But the conversation between binary and ternary logic can be done automatically.
I know of no class of problems in computer science that can be better addressed by ternary computing than by binary computing. There may be some of them out there. But in general ternary computing doesn't change enough to have an impact.
Just because something is open in the public doesn't waive the copyrights. CNN can be watched by approximately 2 billion people everyday, and the news still have the (c)CNN thingy.
It works the other way around: Copyright was made to allow you to publish something without fearing that now everyone can copy and use it.
We had exactly two customers, and the price tag for the software was $275,000,000. (Yes... all the nine numbers...).
Not what I would call 'boxed software'.