Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and try doing a search on monster or dice. When I last did a search to see what was out there, it showed 24 jobs in my area.(Atlanta, GA population 4 million). This was for any job with C, C++ or COM in the description. Most of these jobs were looking for sennior engineers or those with a very specific skillset. It's not much better for other langauges such as java, PERL, etc. I think you need to get a clue, even in 1999, when the economy was strong, employers were very picky about who they hired. There was and never has been an IT labor shortage. That was just some crap drummed up to allow the importation of H1B Visas, in order to further drive down the salaries of engineers.
I usually hate it when people do this, but the parent of this post is one of the most insightful comments that I have read on slashdot. Reread it a couple of times if it doesn't make sense, because there are quite a few keen observations.
I'll agree with luck having something to do with it. But please, those guys don't work THAT hard. I've done factory work before, and land scaping, ditch digging, it's not THAT fucking hard. Our country has one of the best student financial aid programs in the world. The idea that someone can't go to their local university, take a loan, and get a degree is ridiculous. Now, in India, over there getting in college is tough, where maybe one in ten thousand get to go. But telling me that someone over here is too poor to go college, when I paid my way through and got two degrees, is absolute bullshit.
Yes, you have missed the point. The idea of capitalism is to give everyone an equal opportunity. Unchecked capitalism could surely lead to corruption of the government and eventually an oligarchy or some form of dictatorship. Think about it this way, the larger a company is, the more it can use it's size to stamp out competition. This eventually leads to higher prices, since there is not competition. This company then goes and uses it's size to take over other markets. Pretty soon, capitalism becomes a far away dream, since every thing is owned by one man/corporation. In order to keep capitalism working properly, once a market get's too pyramid-like(with one company at the top), the top must be chopped off, to allow for new growth and competition. Pure capitalism cannot work in the real world, because once a company get's big enough it's too easy for it to destroy all competition and buy government. So, unless you like the idea of living in a world where the gap between rich and poor are as wide as the Atlantic Ocean and the 'royalty' are those whose ancestors had a great idea 300 years ago, then putting some restrictions on capitalism is a good thing.
Ok, where do you store the information about where the error is in the 3 bit string. You have listed next to each 3 bit number an error and a position for that error. You also need to include information indicating whether or not the digits following the encoded 000 and 111 is significant. So here is your algorithm(the flaws in your reasoning should be apparent):
000 0 00
001 0 11
010 0 10
011 1 01
100 0 01
101 1 10
110 1 11
111 1 00
Reordering you encoded strings we get 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111, which is the exact same amount of data that we were trying to compress, so therefore you cannot compress a truly random 3 bit string, nice try though.
Note: we need to use 00 for the case of 111 and 000 in order the alorightm to be able to differentiate between cases such as 111 and 1,1,1.
You're right, my panny (ct36hx41) does an anapamophic (sp?) squeeze, which wastes the top and bottom half of the screen in 1080i mode, and uses all the scanlines for the 16:9 picture. It's not the best solution, but in this transition period, it's pretty much a tossup, I guess it depends on whether you think you'll be spending more time watching the half dozen HD channels, or the 200+ NTSC channels, I figured I would be doing the latter, although I have to admit, HD is pretty compelling and can even make Jay Leno look good.
Wrong, outputting in 1024x768 is trivial, and allowing the convexant chip to scale it to 1920x1080i is also trivial. 1024x768 is by no means out of the reach of the geforce 3. Yes, it won't be as high a detail as it would if the convexant hd encoder could take 1920x1080i as input but it's still a hell of alot better than 640x480p. Probably any game that outputs 1024x768 will allow either 720p or 1080i support. Remember, the choice of hd resolution support is in the XBox setting menu, not in the game itself. So, any game that outputs a resolution higher than 640x480 will be scaled to 1080i or 720p by the XBox. Since most hdtv's support only 1080i and not 720p the output resolution will be optimized for 1080i, which means outputting 1024x768 to the hd encoder, and allowing it to scale it to 1920x1080i.
Note quite, there are actually two different versions of 480p. One is at 720x480p, the other is at 640x480p. When my panasonic ct36hx41 gets the first version, it squeezes the image into a 16:9 letterbox without wasting any scanlines for the top or bottom bars. If it receives a 4:3 formatted 480p signal (640x480) it fills the entire screen.
I think his confusion was caused by the fact that he was wondering why a 640x480 image would fill his widescreen correctly. Actually, the widescreen 480p is 720x480. There is also a 640x480 version of 480p that will display in standard 4:3 format. One is used for movies, the other for standard formatted television. An hdtv automatically will adjust and sync to these format properly.
I rented the XBox for five days from blockbuster and bought the hdtv adapter from Compusa using the takeback special(they deserve it for screwing me over so many times, like that time they held onto $200 of my money for two months without sending me the product I ordered and lied about receiving the money, but I digress). Anyway, one thing I can say is that composite output does not do the Xbox justice, you definitely need to use the high-definition component adapter to get an idea of the real power. None of the games currently support 1080i, however the startup screen does, and it is awesome. As far as the games that don't support hd, well, they still run at 480p (640x480x60hz for the hdtv illiterate). However, it's not widescreen 480p, widescreen at 480p is actually 720x480x60hz, if I remember correctly. I would say that the geforce 3 should easily support hd resolutions, unless the fillrate is being chewed up elsewhere, think about it, I run quake III at 1600x1200x32 at 90 + fps on my pc, so this card should be able to do 1920x1080ix16bits at the required framerate. I am in serious doubt of this artx chip that the gamecube is using however, there is a reason that nvidia is at the top of their game, and that is because their chips have an extreme amount of fillrate and performance. If you are looking for hdtv support, I would stick with the XBox, it has the kind of hardware that should be able to handle those kinds of resolutions.
P.S. If I were you I would rent the consoles before buying, for the XBox I would highly recommend checking out halo, and for pure graphics quality, Dead or Alive 3.
to sue the USPTO for neglect when giving a patent that is obviously prior art. One could imagine that there have been alot cases where patents have been awarded that shouldn't have. Is it possible to use legal action as a way of getting them to clean up their act?
Yes, Gordon Moore worked at Intel and his law only applied under the assumption that Intel remained a monopoly. Once AMD started providing competition, Jerry Sander's Law took over, which states that processor speed will double every 12 months. Since Intel is still obeying Moore's Law, it is clear that they are doomed.
I really have to disagree. As a software engineer that works on multiplatform (win98, 2k, solaris, aix, irix, NT, ME) application, I have found the majority of bugs have been in win98 and ME. For whatever reason, they never show up in other OS's. Win ME had a particularily nasty spontaneous reboot 'feature' which happend when the physical memory was maxed out, which caused us to drop support at the last minute for this POS OS. I think the prospect of supporting XP for the home, and dropping 9x support (since XP can be used as a 'home' OS), has many developers creaming in their jeans. I wouldn't underestimate this factor, as it could end up causing quite a few mass migrations to XP once it comes out. I'm sure microsoft is banking on it.
FYI, bub, I am not looking down my nose. I have had to work my fair share of shit jobs. They sucked, I was treated with no respect, and was paid very little in comparison to what I make now. Again, it's about working smart. Only in America, do people expect to make a living doing something such as packing a bunch of shit in a box all day, or sorting and stacking things, etc. Only with an active vision of how what you are doing, is contributing to others, can you be ensured that what you are doing is of any value. Ditch digging doesn't pay well, because typically these people have shut the most valuable thing they have off, that is their mind. I worked at a factory, and one of my jobs was standing in the same spot, like a robot, and simply picking up the newly printed forms, putting them into a box, and running the box through a machine that taped up the top. The reason that jobs like that pay so little, is because the task being done is essentially worthless. Perhaps at the beginning of the industrial revolution, these jobs were necessary, but now, it's no longer needed. Most employers keep these jobs simply because it's easier to keep a few low paid workers around, than to buy an expensive machine that can do the same task, but they DO have that option. If more people realized that in order to get ahead, you need to bring something of real value to your employer, not just a warm body, they wouldn't be abused in such a manner, because the ones left over that were STILL willing to do such menial tasks would be few and far between. As a result, they would get paid better, and overall, people would make more money. I am not oblivious to the hardships that the working poor face. However, I have also seen through experience, that many of them are in such positions not only because of bad choices that they have made in the past, but because of a persistent belief that capitalism does not apply to them, that they will never succeed at anything, and that only 'lucky' or 'rich' people get the good jobs.
Some things to remember:
1. The majority of college sysadmins don't get paid shit compared to what they could make elsewhere, hence, one of the 'perks' for being ripped off is a 'relaxed' atmosphere.
2. Capitalism isn't about working hard, it's about working smart. It's about the exchange of something of value for money. In other words, if you only have to work 4 hours a day and your employer feels that you are giving something of value in return, then that is ok. You do not owe anyone your life, if you are ripping them off by not doing your job, the market will correct this and you will be replaced. On the other hand, if you have a unique skillset, or something of value to offer, then you should be paid accordingly, again, to whatever the market will bear. If every person in the working class realized this, we wouldn't have near as much of a problem with labor unions, because the constant bargaining for higher salaries would naturally ensure that they got paid what they were worth.
This is called capitalism, it's too bad that the average Joe doesn't feel that this applies to him and that he owes nothing more than what the market will bear in exchange for what he gets paid.
What about the fact that linux has more applications available? Or the fact that linux has some VERY nice toolkits such as GTK. Have you ever tried using motif? GTK is much nicer, and as you mentioned, it's free. I think the other reason linux is moving into the UNIX workstation market is that it's simply a better OS for workstations. The GUI is more modern than CDE, and if everyone adopts like they say they are, it could provide what CDE promised 10 years ago, and that is, and open platform for all RISC based hardware vendors.
If you want to find out what is amazing about this card, read on:
This card is based on NEC's powerVR architecture, and is really nothing more than the PowerVR2 clocked up to 175 mhz. What's funny is, I remember getting excited about this card over 3 years ago!! If you want to do more research on the architecture, dig up some old articles on Tom's hardware, where he benches it with quake1. At the time, the card was supposed to clean up the market, and it was going to debut at 125 mhz core/memory speed. (This was at the time when the voodoo1 was the standard, and the voodoo2 had just entered the scene, I remember holding out for this card, and simply settled on a TNT when I found out that NEC decided to drop out of the PC market). Then NEC made a deal with Sega, and put the chip in the dreamcast. What's even more amazing about the chip, is that ST simply had to change the clock to 175 mhz to make it competitive with nvidia's gefore2 ultra. What I think will be scary, is when they revamp this 4 year old chip design, and add T & L. Imagine what a chip like this could do with DDR RAM instead of SDRAM. This current chip only supports SDRAM, which is why they didn't put DDR RAM on the card. I think nvidia has their work cut out for them. Hopefully they will be able to license tile based rendering for their next card. I was really hoping that they would put it in the geforce 3, it would have made quite a bit greater difference than a crossbar memory architcture.
Re:No X, no X security holes
on
GTK+ without X!
·
· Score: 1
One of the biggest bottlenecks on the internet occurs with routers and switches. Routers require very high speed memory. I imagine that having higher speed memory could increase the bandwidth of routers significantly, which, as a result will help to speed up the internet.
That should be a pretty easy problem to solve. Just initialize a chip that can reset the RAM to 0. This isn't a very complicated process, it just needs to index every address and set it to 0. Since the power button is used to turn it on and off, one could have it set up so that if a user holds the power button down for 4 seconds, the motherboard will resets it's memory. Or, you could simply design a memory reset switch. Not a big deal.
I think what you mean to say is that they will fail because there cause is not PRACTICAL. Many irrational causes succeed, impractical, expensive causes usually fail.
And, like IBM, you are showing your true colors as a short-sighted moron. Remember, high-end is what drives the market. You're complaining about progress like it is a bad thing. Please remember that if it weren't for the constant improvement of PC hardware, things like the internet as we know it today and smart word-processing apps would still be a dream. You are wrong about performance not making a machine more useable. Having a higher performance processor allows the PC to better bridge the gap between what people want and what the machine can do. It allows us to design more sophisticated interfaces, eventually, even language based interfaces will become more common once the processing power is there. I also think that the idea of companies focusing on manufacturing rather than making faster processors displays a complete misunderstanding of the market. Most companies make the majority of their money from the high end. The low-end processors make very little. So, to tell a microprocessor company like intel to drop their cash cow and go for the low end is the stupidest idea I've heard in a long time.
I think you are naive to say that people can't find uses for this processing power. I think games are an easy example, they easily can use up the CPU cycles on a processor. Now, I'm sure you're going to say that we don't need them. Who gives a shit? Quit trying to place some warped sense of puritanic philosophy on technology. I don't really care if I don't need it. I'm glad that I can do it. Getting away from consumer applications, the software that I write for a living models geographic data collected via sattelite to view in a 3D virtual world. WE could use that power and so can most of our customers.
You are also making the mistake of viewing the PC as one appliance. It's NOT an appliance, it's a computer. It's flexable, that's what makes it so powerful, it can do many things very well, as long as the processing power is there. There will always be a need for more power, because, as PC's become more powerful, their function changes. They are able to morph into what we want them to be. If we have the power, we can use our PC as a vcr, a stereo, a telephone(over the net), these are all things that require power that didn't exist 5 years ago, and I am sure that as they get more powerful, their function will change yet again, to allow them to solve even more problems. If we limited this power, we would limit the amount of utility that we could get from these devices, which, in the long run, would hurt us.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and try doing a search on monster or dice. When I last did a search to see what was out there, it showed 24 jobs in my area.(Atlanta, GA population 4 million). This was for any job with C, C++ or COM in the description. Most of these jobs were looking for sennior engineers or those with a very specific skillset. It's not much better for other langauges such as java, PERL, etc. I think you need to get a clue, even in 1999, when the economy was strong, employers were very picky about who they hired. There was and never has been an IT labor shortage. That was just some crap drummed up to allow the importation of H1B Visas, in order to further drive down the salaries of engineers.
I usually hate it when people do this, but the parent of this post is one of the most insightful comments that I have read on slashdot. Reread it a couple of times if it doesn't make sense, because there are quite a few keen observations.
I'll agree with luck having something to do with it. But please, those guys don't work THAT hard. I've done factory work before, and land scaping, ditch digging, it's not THAT fucking hard. Our country has one of the best student financial aid programs in the world. The idea that someone can't go to their local university, take a loan, and get a degree is ridiculous. Now, in India, over there getting in college is tough, where maybe one in ten thousand get to go. But telling me that someone over here is too poor to go college, when I paid my way through and got two degrees, is absolute bullshit.
Yes, you have missed the point. The idea of capitalism is to give everyone an equal opportunity. Unchecked capitalism could surely lead to corruption of the government and eventually an oligarchy or some form of dictatorship. Think about it this way, the larger a company is, the more it can use it's size to stamp out competition. This eventually leads to higher prices, since there is not competition. This company then goes and uses it's size to take over other markets. Pretty soon, capitalism becomes a far away dream, since every thing is owned by one man/corporation. In order to keep capitalism working properly, once a market get's too pyramid-like(with one company at the top), the top must be chopped off, to allow for new growth and competition. Pure capitalism cannot work in the real world, because once a company get's big enough it's too easy for it to destroy all competition and buy government. So, unless you like the idea of living in a world where the gap between rich and poor are as wide as the Atlantic Ocean and the 'royalty' are those whose ancestors had a great idea 300 years ago, then putting some restrictions on capitalism is a good thing.
Ok, where do you store the information about where the error is in the 3 bit string. You have listed next to each 3 bit number an error and a position for that error. You also need to include information indicating whether or not the digits following the encoded 000 and 111 is significant. So here is your algorithm(the flaws in your reasoning should be apparent):
000 0 00
001 0 11
010 0 10
011 1 01
100 0 01
101 1 10
110 1 11
111 1 00
Reordering you encoded strings we get 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111, which is the exact same amount of data that we were trying to compress, so therefore you cannot compress a truly random 3 bit string, nice try though.
Note: we need to use 00 for the case of 111 and 000 in order the alorightm to be able to differentiate between cases such as 111 and 1,1,1.
You're right, my panny (ct36hx41) does an anapamophic (sp?) squeeze, which wastes the top and bottom half of the screen in 1080i mode, and uses all the scanlines for the 16:9 picture. It's not the best solution, but in this transition period, it's pretty much a tossup, I guess it depends on whether you think you'll be spending more time watching the half dozen HD channels, or the 200+ NTSC channels, I figured I would be doing the latter, although I have to admit, HD is pretty compelling and can even make Jay Leno look good.
Wrong, outputting in 1024x768 is trivial, and allowing the convexant chip to scale it to 1920x1080i is also trivial. 1024x768 is by no means out of the reach of the geforce 3. Yes, it won't be as high a detail as it would if the convexant hd encoder could take 1920x1080i as input but it's still a hell of alot better than 640x480p. Probably any game that outputs 1024x768 will allow either 720p or 1080i support. Remember, the choice of hd resolution support is in the XBox setting menu, not in the game itself. So, any game that outputs a resolution higher than 640x480 will be scaled to 1080i or 720p by the XBox. Since most hdtv's support only 1080i and not 720p the output resolution will be optimized for 1080i, which means outputting 1024x768 to the hd encoder, and allowing it to scale it to 1920x1080i.
Exactly, I think they were confusing widescreen tv's with hdtv. My hdtv is not widescreen, but can still display hd content.
Note quite, there are actually two different versions of 480p. One is at 720x480p, the other is at 640x480p. When my panasonic ct36hx41 gets the first version, it squeezes the image into a 16:9 letterbox without wasting any scanlines for the top or bottom bars. If it receives a 4:3 formatted 480p signal (640x480) it fills the entire screen.
I think his confusion was caused by the fact that he was wondering why a 640x480 image would fill his widescreen correctly. Actually, the widescreen 480p is 720x480. There is also a 640x480 version of 480p that will display in standard 4:3 format. One is used for movies, the other for standard formatted television. An hdtv automatically will adjust and sync to these format properly.
I rented the XBox for five days from blockbuster and bought the hdtv adapter from Compusa using the takeback special(they deserve it for screwing me over so many times, like that time they held onto $200 of my money for two months without sending me the product I ordered and lied about receiving the money, but I digress). Anyway, one thing I can say is that composite output does not do the Xbox justice, you definitely need to use the high-definition component adapter to get an idea of the real power. None of the games currently support 1080i, however the startup screen does, and it is awesome. As far as the games that don't support hd, well, they still run at 480p (640x480x60hz for the hdtv illiterate). However, it's not widescreen 480p, widescreen at 480p is actually 720x480x60hz, if I remember correctly. I would say that the geforce 3 should easily support hd resolutions, unless the fillrate is being chewed up elsewhere, think about it, I run quake III at 1600x1200x32 at 90 + fps on my pc, so this card should be able to do 1920x1080ix16bits at the required framerate. I am in serious doubt of this artx chip that the gamecube is using however, there is a reason that nvidia is at the top of their game, and that is because their chips have an extreme amount of fillrate and performance. If you are looking for hdtv support, I would stick with the XBox, it has the kind of hardware that should be able to handle those kinds of resolutions.
P.S. If I were you I would rent the consoles before buying, for the XBox I would highly recommend checking out halo, and for pure graphics quality, Dead or Alive 3.
to sue the USPTO for neglect when giving a patent that is obviously prior art. One could imagine that there have been alot cases where patents have been awarded that shouldn't have. Is it possible to use legal action as a way of getting them to clean up their act?
I agree, you should ask for your money back right away.
Yes, Gordon Moore worked at Intel and his law only applied under the assumption that Intel remained a monopoly. Once AMD started providing competition, Jerry Sander's Law took over, which states that processor speed will double every 12 months. Since Intel is still obeying Moore's Law, it is clear that they are doomed.
EXACTLY. I got really excited, until I went and read the press release, and realized that it was another #$!#$#$&*$&^ slashdot typo.
I really have to disagree. As a software engineer that works on multiplatform (win98, 2k, solaris, aix, irix, NT, ME) application, I have found the majority of bugs have been in win98 and ME. For whatever reason, they never show up in other OS's. Win ME had a particularily nasty spontaneous reboot 'feature' which happend when the physical memory was maxed out, which caused us to drop support at the last minute for this POS OS. I think the prospect of supporting XP for the home, and dropping 9x support (since XP can be used as a 'home' OS), has many developers creaming in their jeans. I wouldn't underestimate this factor, as it could end up causing quite a few mass migrations to XP once it comes out. I'm sure microsoft is banking on it.
FYI, bub, I am not looking down my nose. I have had to work my fair share of shit jobs. They sucked, I was treated with no respect, and was paid very little in comparison to what I make now. Again, it's about working smart. Only in America, do people expect to make a living doing something such as packing a bunch of shit in a box all day, or sorting and stacking things, etc. Only with an active vision of how what you are doing, is contributing to others, can you be ensured that what you are doing is of any value. Ditch digging doesn't pay well, because typically these people have shut the most valuable thing they have off, that is their mind. I worked at a factory, and one of my jobs was standing in the same spot, like a robot, and simply picking up the newly printed forms, putting them into a box, and running the box through a machine that taped up the top. The reason that jobs like that pay so little, is because the task being done is essentially worthless. Perhaps at the beginning of the industrial revolution, these jobs were necessary, but now, it's no longer needed. Most employers keep these jobs simply because it's easier to keep a few low paid workers around, than to buy an expensive machine that can do the same task, but they DO have that option. If more people realized that in order to get ahead, you need to bring something of real value to your employer, not just a warm body, they wouldn't be abused in such a manner, because the ones left over that were STILL willing to do such menial tasks would be few and far between. As a result, they would get paid better, and overall, people would make more money. I am not oblivious to the hardships that the working poor face. However, I have also seen through experience, that many of them are in such positions not only because of bad choices that they have made in the past, but because of a persistent belief that capitalism does not apply to them, that they will never succeed at anything, and that only 'lucky' or 'rich' people get the good jobs.
Some things to remember: 1. The majority of college sysadmins don't get paid shit compared to what they could make elsewhere, hence, one of the 'perks' for being ripped off is a 'relaxed' atmosphere. 2. Capitalism isn't about working hard, it's about working smart. It's about the exchange of something of value for money. In other words, if you only have to work 4 hours a day and your employer feels that you are giving something of value in return, then that is ok. You do not owe anyone your life, if you are ripping them off by not doing your job, the market will correct this and you will be replaced. On the other hand, if you have a unique skillset, or something of value to offer, then you should be paid accordingly, again, to whatever the market will bear. If every person in the working class realized this, we wouldn't have near as much of a problem with labor unions, because the constant bargaining for higher salaries would naturally ensure that they got paid what they were worth. This is called capitalism, it's too bad that the average Joe doesn't feel that this applies to him and that he owes nothing more than what the market will bear in exchange for what he gets paid.
What about the fact that linux has more applications available? Or the fact that linux has some VERY nice toolkits such as GTK. Have you ever tried using motif? GTK is much nicer, and as you mentioned, it's free. I think the other reason linux is moving into the UNIX workstation market is that it's simply a better OS for workstations. The GUI is more modern than CDE, and if everyone adopts like they say they are, it could provide what CDE promised 10 years ago, and that is, and open platform for all RISC based hardware vendors.
If you want to find out what is amazing about this card, read on: This card is based on NEC's powerVR architecture, and is really nothing more than the PowerVR2 clocked up to 175 mhz. What's funny is, I remember getting excited about this card over 3 years ago!! If you want to do more research on the architecture, dig up some old articles on Tom's hardware, where he benches it with quake1. At the time, the card was supposed to clean up the market, and it was going to debut at 125 mhz core/memory speed. (This was at the time when the voodoo1 was the standard, and the voodoo2 had just entered the scene, I remember holding out for this card, and simply settled on a TNT when I found out that NEC decided to drop out of the PC market). Then NEC made a deal with Sega, and put the chip in the dreamcast. What's even more amazing about the chip, is that ST simply had to change the clock to 175 mhz to make it competitive with nvidia's gefore2 ultra. What I think will be scary, is when they revamp this 4 year old chip design, and add T & L. Imagine what a chip like this could do with DDR RAM instead of SDRAM. This current chip only supports SDRAM, which is why they didn't put DDR RAM on the card. I think nvidia has their work cut out for them. Hopefully they will be able to license tile based rendering for their next card. I was really hoping that they would put it in the geforce 3, it would have made quite a bit greater difference than a crossbar memory architcture.
That's what VNC is for.
One of the biggest bottlenecks on the internet occurs with routers and switches. Routers require very high speed memory. I imagine that having higher speed memory could increase the bandwidth of routers significantly, which, as a result will help to speed up the internet.
That should be a pretty easy problem to solve. Just initialize a chip that can reset the RAM to 0. This isn't a very complicated process, it just needs to index every address and set it to 0. Since the power button is used to turn it on and off, one could have it set up so that if a user holds the power button down for 4 seconds, the motherboard will resets it's memory. Or, you could simply design a memory reset switch. Not a big deal.
I think what you mean to say is that they will fail because there cause is not PRACTICAL. Many irrational causes succeed, impractical, expensive causes usually fail.
And, like IBM, you are showing your true colors as a short-sighted moron. Remember, high-end is what drives the market. You're complaining about progress like it is a bad thing. Please remember that if it weren't for the constant improvement of PC hardware, things like the internet as we know it today and smart word-processing apps would still be a dream. You are wrong about performance not making a machine more useable. Having a higher performance processor allows the PC to better bridge the gap between what people want and what the machine can do. It allows us to design more sophisticated interfaces, eventually, even language based interfaces will become more common once the processing power is there. I also think that the idea of companies focusing on manufacturing rather than making faster processors displays a complete misunderstanding of the market. Most companies make the majority of their money from the high end. The low-end processors make very little. So, to tell a microprocessor company like intel to drop their cash cow and go for the low end is the stupidest idea I've heard in a long time. I think you are naive to say that people can't find uses for this processing power. I think games are an easy example, they easily can use up the CPU cycles on a processor. Now, I'm sure you're going to say that we don't need them. Who gives a shit? Quit trying to place some warped sense of puritanic philosophy on technology. I don't really care if I don't need it. I'm glad that I can do it. Getting away from consumer applications, the software that I write for a living models geographic data collected via sattelite to view in a 3D virtual world. WE could use that power and so can most of our customers. You are also making the mistake of viewing the PC as one appliance. It's NOT an appliance, it's a computer. It's flexable, that's what makes it so powerful, it can do many things very well, as long as the processing power is there. There will always be a need for more power, because, as PC's become more powerful, their function changes. They are able to morph into what we want them to be. If we have the power, we can use our PC as a vcr, a stereo, a telephone(over the net), these are all things that require power that didn't exist 5 years ago, and I am sure that as they get more powerful, their function will change yet again, to allow them to solve even more problems. If we limited this power, we would limit the amount of utility that we could get from these devices, which, in the long run, would hurt us.