"automatic debugger of threaded programs which detects many of thread-correctness issues such as data-races, dead-locks, threads stalls" (Sarcasm fails me...)
Oh wait, nevermind. This sentence shows that the author truly can't write clearly.
Couldn't you make that sentance pretty normal sounding just by removing that one errant 'of', i.e.
"[The software includes an] automatic debugger of threaded programs, which detects many thread-correctness issues such as data-races, dead-locks, threads stalls [...]"
Although, one would think Intel would be more careful about proof-reading their sales literature; western developers (i.e. the target of English-language technical sales literature) probably prefer not to be reminded of jobs like theirs being exported to places like India (which poorly-written technical documentation may remind them of).
We all remember WinXP Home and Pro, and how "useable" Home was. Generally, whoever got the "Home" edition of XP got it 'cause he couldn't get his PC without any license and tossing Home was cheaper than tossing Pro.
That may be your experience - I work at a university, and plenty of people with laptops seem to have Home on them. I suspect it's a cost-saving measure by laptop makers designing low-budget products.
In my view, most people with XP Home got it because it was cheaper than Pro (obviously), but are in fact using it.
# Voted NO on allowing human embryonic stem cell research. (May 2005) -- Government should not be funding research.
# Voted YES on funding for health providers who don't provide abortion info. (Sep 2002) -- Government is not supposed to be promoting particular social agendas.
# Voted YES on banning Family Planning funding in US aid abroad. (May 2001) -- Government should not be taking money from hard working taxpayers in the US and sending out to foreign countries.
One would think, if the government should not be funding medical research, or funding giving out medical info abroad, that the government should also not be funding people giving out medical info at home.
I'm sure one could rationalise Paul's voting, it just strikes me as a little contradictory.
# Voted YES on banning partial-birth abortion except to save mother's life. (Oct 2003) [...] But don't say Ron Paul is not for the rights of women. He is for the rights of everybody equally. You only differ in when you think a baby's rights start to exist.
There's a name for people who are "for everybody's rights, but believe babies have rights prior to birth" and that word is "pro-life".
There's nothing wrong with being pro-life, of course; it's a stance a lot of people in the US take, and there are some good arguments for it. But regardless of how complicated and nuanced your libertarian philosophy may be, if under its guidance your voting record is pro-life, then you are pro-life.
If they know that a particular game has a particular hot path, they can optimize that path. Maybe the optimization that they use wouldn't make sense for the general case, but they know it will work in that particular case.
Are there actually that many cases when an optimisation doesn't make sense?
Game X does a lot of operation Y, so we make operation Y faster, fine. But in what case would it be beneficial to make operation Y slower?
It's not like our high-end graphics cards are short of RAM to store code in, or anything.
Competition is one thing in a regular market, but the accusation is that Intel is using their marketplace power and financial reserves to undercut a not-for-profit to force them out of the market as part of their corporate rivalry with AMD, who supplied the CPUs for the OLPC machines.
On the other hand, if Intel provided a product that achieved OLPC's educational aims, but heavily subsidised it, one could argue that the OLPC project fulfilled its aims - Just instead of distributing their own product they tricked Intel into designing, distributing, supporting and paying for it.
There are some of us who scratch our heads and wonder exactly what he is doing in college. He doesn't teach the upper level classes, but he is a hit with the intro classes. I have seen absolutely no assessment data indicating whether his approach is actually helping these students learn. Perhaps it is, perhaps not.
You could consider looking at the exam papers he sets and the results he gets - that might shed some light on the issue. If he's got an effective technique worked out, you could borrow from it and hence become a better teacher.
For what it's worth, in my experience there are at least some situations where something fancy and modern (like an animation) can communicate an idea faster and more clearly than an explanation on a chalkboard. Obviously, this isn't always the case, though; indeed, many of my best lecturers in college were chalkboard-writers.
I've been using computers for decades, and I haven't memorised a fraction of the keyboard shortcuts I could find useful.
For some applications you can buy a keyboard with preprinted shortcuts on keys - Final Cut, for example.
At $150 this keyboard would have been extremely competitive with such products; special keyboards can easily cost $200. However, at $1500, it's less relevant.
Every time someone asks Slashdot a question like this, the hysteria crowd comes out of the woodwork to scream about how it's absolutely impossible for an "amateur" to do it, and you absolutely must hire a "professional," lest something tragic happen
I can't speak for other posters, but when I see stories like this I can't help but think "this could be done by an experienced amateur, but if you're posting on slashdot asking how to go about it, you probably aren't an experienced amateur".
To put it another way, he's better off learning to program microcontrollers by making himself a thingy to adjust his computer's fan speeds (and/or a similar basic project to learn with) and leaving the industrial process control alone until he has some more experience.
The page was in competent hands, and the campaign could still manipulate people using the page (they had full access). The status-quo was not broken. Obama's campaign just want COMPLETE control over everything dealing with their candidate, which I find more frightening than the MySpace ordeal itself.
Perhaps he was mindful of John McCain's experience with other people having control over content shown on his myspace page.
Do you think any marriage could survive the couple being together 24 hours a day in an enclosed space for several years?
One would think this could be determined experimentally on earth. Hell, it could be self-funding with a reality TV show. Big Brother, but no evictions, three years long, and with highly educated, extremely fit, fighter pilots.
Virginia Tech shooting had a false suspect. The mistake has been revealed and he is fine now. Why should this be any different?
Well, as an example, I didn't know Pete Townshend was innocent until I read this story. For several years I was under the impression he had admitted downloading child pornography, claiming it was for "research". Apparently, this is not the case.
Given that I've been wrong for several years, it seems likely at least some other people made the same mistake.
It sucks to be wrongly accused if a load of people are under the impression you're guilty, even several years after you are found innocent.
There's a few reason to have desktops: 1. Large monitors 2. Large diskspace 3. Better graphics cards 4. You want to tinker with it, upgrade etc.
In the first two cases, there's even less benefit; you can plug a laptop into a monitor and external hard disk when at your desk, and do without them when you're travelling.
Personally my next computer purchase will be a laptop because portability is a more compelling benefit than a speed increase I'm unlikely to notice in everyday use.
I think dumbing the program down to attract women is ultimately a bad idea.
Isn't it possible changes could be made that did not constitute 'dumbing down'?
For example, 2003 was the first year that female medical school applicants outnumbered male. This doesn't implicitly mean medical courses have been dumbed down for women; it could mean opinions in society have been changed, and/or courses have been modified to appeal to both genders instead of just one.
Perhaps similar modifications could be made to computer science courses. For example, if computer science courses over-emphasise a 'hacker culture' of all-night programming sessions and cold pizza eating, that might not appeal to women. But you could discard such culture without harming the academic integrity of the course.
There are such better, more universal video formats out there, I just can't understand why the hell these sites convert the videos to such a crap format.
I was recently putting a video online, and used a flash player. I chose it because it was 'the best of a bad bunch'.
In general to get support you're going to be targeting software several versions old; demanding users spend time upgrading is a great way to drive them away. Anyway, your options are RealMedia's format, Windows Media Player's WMV, Apple's quicktime, and Flash's flv.
RealMedia is out due to the widespread (and in my view justified) dislike of it's player, and resulting small installed base. WMV means dealing with Windows Media Player, of which there are a large number of versions, and which in my experience has a very confusing UI when embedded into a web page. I like Quicktime's user interface, but few people have it installed. Flash can have a good user interface (it being configurable) and version 6 has a larger installed base than any other option.
So, I went for Flash 6. I realise it isn't a great format, but it has widespread support and is nicer to use than WMV.
I considered forgoing an embedded player and just having a link to an MPEG. However, I tend to ignore such links (as it's a bother to download, choose a location to save to, start the player program, and so on) and if I wanted the video to be ignored, I wouldn't put it on the website to begin with.
Believe me, I'd like it if everyone to had the newest version of Quicktime (or better yet, a fully open player with the same quality and usability) installed and working. However, this is unlikely to become true in the immediate future, so Flash is what we have to work with.
Some temperature monitors on critical, exposed devices would also help. All you need is the CPU temperature diode present on just about every motherboard sold today.
I looked at the actual report on the NASA website; it said "the spacecraft's power management software misinterpreted the battery over temperature as a battery overcharge and terminated its charge current."
There was a temperature monitor on the critical, exposed component. Furthermore, the information from the sensor was used in a sensible manner: Li-poly/li-ion batteries can catch fire under some circumstances (see also: sony laptop batteries) so if your li-poly battery overheats while being charged you stop charging it (because you'd rather have a flat battery than an exploded battery).
After the craft stopped charging the battery it never started charging the battery again. The battery ran down and the craft stopped working.
The obvious question is: why didn't charging resume after the battery had cooled down? It might not have cooled down (as it was hot in the first place due to being exposed to the sun) or the system might have been waiting for a 'resume charging' command from ground control, which was never received as the high-gain antenna was in the wrong position.
Personally if I was designing a space craft I'd duplicate the (presumably quite small) onboard computer and radio hardware, because it seems quite common for software/electronics failures to result in loss of communications. Having two processors running different software, each capable of reprogramming the other one if it became broken, would seem like a sensible route to take.
The preliminary official report is availiable from here. The summary conclusions are:
* A modification to a spacecraft parameter, intended to update the High Gain Antenna's (HGA) pointing direction used for contingency operations, was mistakenly written to the incorrect spacecraft memory address in June 2006. The incorrect memory load resulted in the following unintended actions: ** Disabled the solar array positioning limits. ** Corrupted the HGA's pointing direction used during contingency operations. * A command sent to MGS on November 2, 2006 caused the solar array to attempt to exceed its hardware constraint, which led the onboard fault protection system to place the spacecraft in a somewhat unusual contingency orientation. * The spacecraft contingency orientation with respect to the sun caused one of the batteries to overheat. * The spacecraft's power management software misinterpreted the battery over temperature as a battery overcharge and terminated its charge current. * The spacecraft could not sufficiently recharge the remaining battery to support the electrical loads on a continuing basis. * Spacecraft signals and all functions were determined to be lost within five to six orbits (ten-twelve hours) preventing further attempts to correct the situation. * Due to loss of power, the spacecraft is assumed to be lost and all recovery operations ceased on January 28, 2007.
"Reverse stock split [...] a reduction in number of shares and an accompanying increase in the share price. The ratio is also reversed: 1-for-2, or 1-for-3."
Of course, the company wouldn't become worth any more money, but the share price would go up.
I was thinking software for some reason, meant to write linear.
To add to the confusion, some chips, are traditionally measured in one dimension only (optical sensor sizes are based on old camera film formats, which are measured along the diagonal) in which case the relationship *is* squared - and what's more, optical sensors are an area where people are more likely to need to know die size!
One core on top, one on bottom, cache in the middle.
I'm speculating a bit here, but in the modern world of 4 megabyte on-die caches, I'd think the millions of gates of on-die cache would take up several times more area than the actual processor cores. This being the case, you'd think splitting the cache across several layers would mean you could get more chips per wafer, not less! Of course, thinking about it, four times the number of layers means four times as many defects.
Here's some trivia I learned recently: Some manufacturers put redundant/backup hardware in their chips, not to improve reliability but to improve yield - so if one row on your RAM chip has a defect, a backup row is used instead. Patching the defects improves yields, and no-one notices the difference.
The tradeoff is that a bigger chip radically reduces yields : the chance of a defect causing a chip to be bad goes up with the square of the number of gates.
Isn't it directly proportional?
Doubling the number of gates doubles the chip area. Doubling the chip area halves the number of chips per wafer. Assuming a constant number of chip-killing defects per wafer (say 5), halving the number of chips per wafer means you have twice the percentage of dead chips (i.e. 5 dead per 50 chips (= 10%) instead of 5 dead per 100 chips (= 5%))
So doubling the number of gates doubles the percentage of bad chips rather than quadrupling it, i.e. a linear (not squared) relationship.
There's just one problem. HEAT DISSIPATION. A 3d chip will of course have it's heating per square centimeter multiplied by the number of layers.
If I was designing a multilayer microprocessor I'd make sure the least coolable (i.e. central) areas were made with low-leakage-current processes and didn't switch too often, while the more coolable outer areas could be less efficient. In other words, I'd put my big stacks of cache in the middle of the layer sandwich and put my actual processor cores on the top and bottom.
Hackers can probably get the new keys after a short while, but everybody who wants to make copies has to get updated illegal circumvention software everytime the keys are changed, which is impractical if you just want to make a quick copy of a rented or borrowed disc. People in the real world value their time, so you only have to make the time cost of copying high enough to make the legal offering more attractive.
If updating software regularly (due to revoked keys) is a big enough bother to stop people engaging in piracy, then updating legit player software because its key has been revoked would be an equally big bother.
Granted, the legit software can have an auto-update server, but the continued existence of sites like "the pirate bay" implies pirates can get access to servers which big media has difficulty getting disabled.
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't you make that sentance pretty normal sounding just by removing that one errant 'of', i.e.
"[The software includes an] automatic debugger of threaded programs, which detects many thread-correctness issues such as data-races, dead-locks, threads stalls [...]"
Although, one would think Intel would be more careful about proof-reading their sales literature; western developers (i.e. the target of English-language technical sales literature) probably prefer not to be reminded of jobs like theirs being exported to places like India (which poorly-written technical documentation may remind them of).
We all remember WinXP Home and Pro, and how "useable" Home was. Generally, whoever got the "Home" edition of XP got it 'cause he couldn't get his PC without any license and tossing Home was cheaper than tossing Pro.
That may be your experience - I work at a university, and plenty of people with laptops seem to have Home on them. I suspect it's a cost-saving measure by laptop makers designing low-budget products.
In my view, most people with XP Home got it because it was cheaper than Pro (obviously), but are in fact using it.
Just FYI.
Michael
# Voted NO on allowing human embryonic stem cell research. (May 2005)
-- Government should not be funding research.
# Voted YES on funding for health providers who don't provide abortion info. (Sep 2002)
-- Government is not supposed to be promoting particular social agendas.
# Voted YES on banning Family Planning funding in US aid abroad. (May 2001)
-- Government should not be taking money from hard working taxpayers in the US and sending out to foreign countries.
One would think, if the government should not be funding medical research, or funding giving out medical info abroad, that the government should also not be funding people giving out medical info at home.
I'm sure one could rationalise Paul's voting, it just strikes me as a little contradictory.
# Voted YES on banning partial-birth abortion except to save mother's life. (Oct 2003)
[...]
But don't say Ron Paul is not for the rights of women. He is for the rights of everybody equally. You only differ in when you think a baby's rights start to exist.
There's a name for people who are "for everybody's rights, but believe babies have rights prior to birth" and that word is "pro-life".
There's nothing wrong with being pro-life, of course; it's a stance a lot of people in the US take, and there are some good arguments for it. But regardless of how complicated and nuanced your libertarian philosophy may be, if under its guidance your voting record is pro-life, then you are pro-life.
If they know that a particular game has a particular hot path, they can optimize that path. Maybe the optimization that they use wouldn't make sense for the general case, but they know it will work in that particular case.
Are there actually that many cases when an optimisation doesn't make sense?
Game X does a lot of operation Y, so we make operation Y faster, fine. But in what case would it be beneficial to make operation Y slower?
It's not like our high-end graphics cards are short of RAM to store code in, or anything.
Competition is one thing in a regular market, but the accusation is that Intel is using their marketplace power and financial reserves to undercut a not-for-profit to force them out of the market as part of their corporate rivalry with AMD, who supplied the CPUs for the OLPC machines.
On the other hand, if Intel provided a product that achieved OLPC's educational aims, but heavily subsidised it, one could argue that the OLPC project fulfilled its aims - Just instead of distributing their own product they tricked Intel into designing, distributing, supporting and paying for it.
There are some of us who scratch our heads and wonder exactly what he is doing in college. He doesn't teach the upper level classes, but he is a hit with the intro classes. I have seen absolutely no assessment data indicating whether his approach is actually helping these students learn. Perhaps it is, perhaps not.
You could consider looking at the exam papers he sets and the results he gets - that might shed some light on the issue. If he's got an effective technique worked out, you could borrow from it and hence become a better teacher.
For what it's worth, in my experience there are at least some situations where something fancy and modern (like an animation) can communicate an idea faster and more clearly than an explanation on a chalkboard. Obviously, this isn't always the case, though; indeed, many of my best lecturers in college were chalkboard-writers.
I've been using computers for decades, and I haven't memorised a fraction of the keyboard shortcuts I could find useful.
For some applications you can buy a keyboard with preprinted shortcuts on keys - Final Cut, for example.
At $150 this keyboard would have been extremely competitive with such products; special keyboards can easily cost $200. However, at $1500, it's less relevant.
Michael
Every time someone asks Slashdot a question like this, the hysteria crowd comes out of the woodwork to scream about how it's absolutely impossible for an "amateur" to do it, and you absolutely must hire a "professional," lest something tragic happen
I can't speak for other posters, but when I see stories like this I can't help but think "this could be done by an experienced amateur, but if you're posting on slashdot asking how to go about it, you probably aren't an experienced amateur".
To put it another way, he's better off learning to program microcontrollers by making himself a thingy to adjust his computer's fan speeds (and/or a similar basic project to learn with) and leaving the industrial process control alone until he has some more experience.
Just my $0.02.
The page was in competent hands, and the campaign could still manipulate people using the page (they had full access). The status-quo was not broken. Obama's campaign just want COMPLETE control over everything dealing with their candidate, which I find more frightening than the MySpace ordeal itself.
Perhaps he was mindful of John McCain's experience with other people having control over content shown on his myspace page.
Do you think any marriage could survive the couple being together 24 hours a day in an enclosed space for several years?
One would think this could be determined experimentally on earth. Hell, it could be self-funding with a reality TV show. Big Brother, but no evictions, three years long, and with highly educated, extremely fit, fighter pilots.
OK, from the article:
Pupils are being discouraged from taking A-level maths as schools in England chase higher places in the league tables, scientists have claimed.
[...]
The Department for Education and Skills said more pupils were studying maths.
Now, tell me if I need remedial classes in English, but it sounds to me like more pupils are studying maths, i.e. the opposite of fewer.
Godman is recontextualizing the images, and that, in and of itself, can make new and unique works,
Does Goldman do bumper stickers? Because if not, I might have to do a little "recontextualising" of my own.
If copying someone else's t-shirt and selling it as your own is acceptable, what's to stop me copying Goldman's designs and selling them as my own?
Michael
Virginia Tech shooting had a false suspect. The mistake has been revealed and he is fine now. Why should this be any different?
Well, as an example, I didn't know Pete Townshend was innocent until I read this story. For several years I was under the impression he had admitted downloading child pornography, claiming it was for "research". Apparently, this is not the case.
Given that I've been wrong for several years, it seems likely at least some other people made the same mistake.
It sucks to be wrongly accused if a load of people are under the impression you're guilty, even several years after you are found innocent.
I'm going to wager (this being Slashdot) that you're unwilling to install and try out RealPlayer again. Right?
I have installed realplayer not once but three times over the year. It was terrible years ago, and it's still terrible now.
There's a few reason to have desktops:
1. Large monitors
2. Large diskspace
3. Better graphics cards
4. You want to tinker with it, upgrade etc.
In the first two cases, there's even less benefit; you can plug a laptop into a monitor and external hard disk when at your desk, and do without them when you're travelling.
Personally my next computer purchase will be a laptop because portability is a more compelling benefit than a speed increase I'm unlikely to notice in everyday use.
I think dumbing the program down to attract women is ultimately a bad idea.
Isn't it possible changes could be made that did not constitute 'dumbing down'?
For example, 2003 was the first year that female medical school applicants outnumbered male. This doesn't implicitly mean medical courses have been dumbed down for women; it could mean opinions in society have been changed, and/or courses have been modified to appeal to both genders instead of just one.
Perhaps similar modifications could be made to computer science courses. For example, if computer science courses over-emphasise a 'hacker culture' of all-night programming sessions and cold pizza eating, that might not appeal to women. But you could discard such culture without harming the academic integrity of the course.
There are such better, more universal video formats out there, I just can't understand why the hell these sites convert the videos to such a crap format.
I was recently putting a video online, and used a flash player. I chose it because it was 'the best of a bad bunch'.
In general to get support you're going to be targeting software several versions old; demanding users spend time upgrading is a great way to drive them away. Anyway, your options are RealMedia's format, Windows Media Player's WMV, Apple's quicktime, and Flash's flv.
RealMedia is out due to the widespread (and in my view justified) dislike of it's player, and resulting small installed base. WMV means dealing with Windows Media Player, of which there are a large number of versions, and which in my experience has a very confusing UI when embedded into a web page. I like Quicktime's user interface, but few people have it installed. Flash can have a good user interface (it being configurable) and version 6 has a larger installed base than any other option.
So, I went for Flash 6. I realise it isn't a great format, but it has widespread support and is nicer to use than WMV.
I considered forgoing an embedded player and just having a link to an MPEG. However, I tend to ignore such links (as it's a bother to download, choose a location to save to, start the player program, and so on) and if I wanted the video to be ignored, I wouldn't put it on the website to begin with.
Believe me, I'd like it if everyone to had the newest version of Quicktime (or better yet, a fully open player with the same quality and usability) installed and working. However, this is unlikely to become true in the immediate future, so Flash is what we have to work with.
What about people that do searches for their relatives? Or their pets?
My amazon recommendations have never been the same since I ordered "Freya the Friday Fairy" and "Hello Kitty Roller Rescue" for PA's "Child's play" charity...
Motorola are making a phone designed for outdoor use, using an eink/epaper display, according to some articles.
You could buy some eink stuff for test purposes, and see if it's as good as they make out.
Some temperature monitors on critical, exposed devices would also help. All you need is the CPU temperature diode present on just about every motherboard sold today.
I looked at the actual report on the NASA website; it said "the spacecraft's power management software misinterpreted the battery over temperature as a battery overcharge and terminated its charge current."
There was a temperature monitor on the critical, exposed component. Furthermore, the information from the sensor was used in a sensible manner: Li-poly/li-ion batteries can catch fire under some circumstances (see also: sony laptop batteries) so if your li-poly battery overheats while being charged you stop charging it (because you'd rather have a flat battery than an exploded battery).
After the craft stopped charging the battery it never started charging the battery again. The battery ran down and the craft stopped working.
The obvious question is: why didn't charging resume after the battery had cooled down? It might not have cooled down (as it was hot in the first place due to being exposed to the sun) or the system might have been waiting for a 'resume charging' command from ground control, which was never received as the high-gain antenna was in the wrong position.
Personally if I was designing a space craft I'd duplicate the (presumably quite small) onboard computer and radio hardware, because it seems quite common for software/electronics failures to result in loss of communications. Having two processors running different software, each capable of reprogramming the other one if it became broken, would seem like a sensible route to take.
Just my $0.02.
The preliminary official report is availiable from here. The summary conclusions are:
* A modification to a spacecraft parameter, intended to update the High Gain Antenna's (HGA) pointing direction used for contingency operations, was mistakenly written to the incorrect spacecraft memory address in June 2006. The incorrect memory load resulted in the following unintended actions:
** Disabled the solar array positioning limits.
** Corrupted the HGA's pointing direction used during contingency operations.
* A command sent to MGS on November 2, 2006 caused the solar array to attempt to exceed its hardware constraint, which led the onboard fault protection system to place the spacecraft in a somewhat unusual contingency orientation.
* The spacecraft contingency orientation with respect to the sun caused one of the batteries to overheat.
* The spacecraft's power management software misinterpreted the battery over temperature as a battery overcharge and terminated its charge current.
* The spacecraft could not sufficiently recharge the remaining battery to support the electrical loads on a continuing basis.
* Spacecraft signals and all functions were determined to be lost within five to six orbits (ten-twelve hours) preventing further attempts to correct the situation.
* Due to loss of power, the spacecraft is assumed to be lost and all recovery operations ceased on January 28, 2007.
"[W]hat can a company do to boost its share price? Besides stopping to burn money and come up with a working business model, I mean."
Well, how about a reverse stock split?
"Reverse stock split [...] a reduction in number of shares and an accompanying increase in the share price. The ratio is also reversed: 1-for-2, or 1-for-3."
Of course, the company wouldn't become worth any more money, but the share price would go up.
I was thinking software for some reason, meant to write linear.
To add to the confusion, some chips, are traditionally measured in one dimension only (optical sensor sizes are based on old camera film formats, which are measured along the diagonal) in which case the relationship *is* squared - and what's more, optical sensors are an area where people are more likely to need to know die size!
One core on top, one on bottom, cache in the middle.
I'm speculating a bit here, but in the modern world of 4 megabyte on-die caches, I'd think the millions of gates of on-die cache would take up several times more area than the actual processor cores. This being the case, you'd think splitting the cache across several layers would mean you could get more chips per wafer, not less! Of course, thinking about it, four times the number of layers means four times as many defects.
Here's some trivia I learned recently: Some manufacturers put redundant/backup hardware in their chips, not to improve reliability but to improve yield - so if one row on your RAM chip has a defect, a backup row is used instead. Patching the defects improves yields, and no-one notices the difference.
The tradeoff is that a bigger chip radically reduces yields : the chance of a defect causing a chip to be bad goes up with the square of the number of gates.
Isn't it directly proportional?
Doubling the number of gates doubles the chip area. Doubling the chip area halves the number of chips per wafer. Assuming a constant number of chip-killing defects per wafer (say 5), halving the number of chips per wafer means you have twice the percentage of dead chips (i.e. 5 dead per 50 chips (= 10%) instead of 5 dead per 100 chips (= 5%))
So doubling the number of gates doubles the percentage of bad chips rather than quadrupling it, i.e. a linear (not squared) relationship.
There's just one problem. HEAT DISSIPATION. A 3d chip will of course have it's heating per square centimeter multiplied by the number of layers.
If I was designing a multilayer microprocessor I'd make sure the least coolable (i.e. central) areas were made with low-leakage-current processes and didn't switch too often, while the more coolable outer areas could be less efficient. In other words, I'd put my big stacks of cache in the middle of the layer sandwich and put my actual processor cores on the top and bottom.
Hackers can probably get the new keys after a short while, but everybody who wants to make copies has to get updated illegal circumvention software everytime the keys are changed, which is impractical if you just want to make a quick copy of a rented or borrowed disc. People in the real world value their time, so you only have to make the time cost of copying high enough to make the legal offering more attractive.
If updating software regularly (due to revoked keys) is a big enough bother to stop people engaging in piracy, then updating legit player software because its key has been revoked would be an equally big bother.
Granted, the legit software can have an auto-update server, but the continued existence of sites like "the pirate bay" implies pirates can get access to servers which big media has difficulty getting disabled.