The key wording is except as authorized under regulations promulgated by the President and published in the Federal Register. I don't know what the current regulations are (I'm trying to find it on whitehouse.gov right now), but I'm thinking satirical newspapers are not included.
WRONG. You've got paragraph (a) down (which it's arguable about whether or not the Onion violatef), but you forgot about the rest of the law:
From Title 18, Section 713, Paragraph (b):
(b) Whoever, except as authorized under regulations promulgated
by the President and published in the Federal Register, knowingly
manufactures, reproduces, sells, or purchases for resale, either
separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, any
likeness of the seals of the President or Vice President, or any
substantial part thereof, except for manufacture or sale of the
article for the official use of the Government of the United
States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than
six months, or both.
So the question is, do the Onion editors want to go to jail?
(b) Whoever, except as authorized under regulations promulgated
by the President and published in the Federal Register, knowingly
manufactures, reproduces, sells, or purchases for resale, either
separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, any
likeness of the seals of the President or Vice President, or any
substantial part thereof, except for manufacture or sale of the
article for the official use of the Government of the United
States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than
six months, or both.
The Onion can and WILL face criminal charges if they persist. This is NOT a matter of copyright law, it is a matter of CRIMINAL law. The Onion editors and/or writers WILL be prosecuted and sentenced if they persist on this route. There is no exception to this law other than obtaining permission from the Office of the President. Since they don't have that permission, they would do best to fix their seal in a hurry.
No, I'm paying attention just fine. I read the entire law, unlike some people around here. Try section (b) on for size:
(b) Whoever, except as authorized under regulations promulgated
by the President and published in the Federal Register, knowingly manufactures,
reproduces, sells, or purchases for resale, either
separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, any
likeness of the seals of the President or Vice President, or any
substantial part thereof, except for manufacture or sale of the
article for the official use of the Government of the United
States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than
six months, or both.
I will repeat myself. The Onion is WRONG. If they want to pursue this, it could become a matter of imprisionment for the Onion editors and/or writers. They do NOT want to mess with this.
You're not paying attention. Stupid or not, parody or not, it doesn't matter. The Presidential Seal is protected by law, not trademark or copyright, and is REQUIRED to be used only by the Presidential Office. ANY inappropriate use cannot, will not, and should not be tolerated.
Given the LAW, the Onion is wrong on this one. Besides, it really wouldn't kill the Onion to make a parody seal instead of trying to co-opt the real seal.
Thought that the Presidential Seal was also in the public domain.
Not really. Making fiction that includes references to a President either current or past is protected by the fact that the person is considered a "public figure", and has thus consented to having works made about them.
The problem with the Presidential Seal is that it's intended to carry the full power and weight of the office of the President and is NOT allowed to be used for anything that the President's office does not directly stand behind.
This "parody" thus places the President's office in a bit of a bind. It's not that they necessarily mind the parody, but they cannot have the seal used inappropriately, even if it seems harmless enough. Yet by requesting its removal, they look like the bad guys to the public.
The best solution I can think of is that the Onion should develop a "fake" seal that conveys the fact that it's fake in some way, shape, or form. In that way they would also parody the seal along with the President himself. This would be covered by fair use, and would not cause any confusion with the real seal.
On Mars, everything is inherently well thermally insulated (which is bad when you need to radiate heat, but if you design your heat flows properly, utilizing waste heat right, you can create very thermally-efficient industrial processes)
I vote for turbopumps. 1/100th atom in, 10 atmospheres out. Should still be cool enough to absorb the waste heat by the time you're done, too.;-)
(Yes, yes, I know. You're throwing away some of your efficiency doing that. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.)
If you can streach one cable to g-sync orbit, you can streach several.
That's only if the carbon nanotube is sufficiently conductive. Regular copper wire or the like wouldn't have sufficient strength to span the distance. Also, it's quite possible that your line losses on such a cable would be nearly as bad as a cohesive energy beam.
And, if I am grokking this correctly, this line would be the temperature of geo-stationary orbit, or at least damn cold, and therefore super-conductors would be effective in slashing the need for repeater statations.
Put that right out of your mind. Space is not "cold", nor is it "hot". Think about it. "Heat" is the vibrational energy of a molecule, right? From this we know of three ways of transferring heat: Conduction, Convection, and Radiation. Since there's no cooler material in contact with the wire in space, the first two options are out. That leaves Radiation. Now to expend heat via radiation, the object needs to get *hot*, not cold. Once it warms to a sufficient temperature, it will begin to glow in the infrared spectrum. (This is where most space equipment cools.) When it warms to a greater temperature, it will glow "red-hot" across the lower spectrum. Eventually (if heat is not dumped fast enough) it will get "white-hot" and emit thermal radiation across a rather wide spectrum, thus producing visible white light.
I wonder if there would be a pd between the top of the cable and the bottom?
Fair enough. But it still seems like you're replacing a rather inexpensive part ($1-$5 DSP or $3-$10 FPGA) with a God-awefully expensive CPU ($20-$50). Perhaps you're making up by combining enough hardware? Also, doesn't a regular processor like a PowerPC or x86 significantly complicate the Bus design? A lot of embedded hardware tend to use a custom bus, or at least a far simpler design than a Desktop PC. Unless you have a customized CPU with simpler pinouts, you're going to need a bus similar to the one the CPU is expecting.
It used to be that only DSPs had the fast barrel shifters for single-cycle shifts of more than one bit position - now most CPUs have them.
I was under the impression that barrel shifters were relatively uncommon on CPUs. For example, the Pentium IV actually removed the hardware barrel shifter that had been added to the original Pentium, and reimplemented it in microcode. Google is being unhelpful at the moment, but I seem to remember that the PowerPC either lacked a barrel shifter, or that the performance was considered sub-par. Is this just my imagination?
Excellent point! In fact, most Space Elevator proponents seem to miss the fact that the energy for the elevator isn't free. You still have to expend at least the minimum amount of energy required to move an object into LEO. The physics of the situation say there are no shortcuts.
What you DO gain is:
a) Slower ascent b) Only minor (if not inconseqential) losses from air friction c) Ability to expend the power over a long period of time vs. in a huge controlled explosion d) A workable descent mode that doesn't require that the hull handle extremes
I'm all for the space elevator idea. However, a lot of people need to understand that this is NOT existing technology. While it's very much possible for the necessary breakthroughs to be completed in the next few decades, dropping everything and working on a Space Elevator would only mean that we'd lose space access for a very long time. That is why NASA is pursuing the CEV and not the Space Elevator as the next major launch vehicle.
SIMD instructions have a lot in common with DSPs. In fact, they really are an attempt to add DSP features to a General Purpose processor with the intent of running multimedia through the main CPU. This has been particularly useful for things like software video players, but CPUs of today still have a hard time competing with dedicated hardware like an MPEG2 hardware codec.
Sounds a) expensive and b) slow. If you just need pluggable codecs, it seems to me that DSPs would be cheaper and faster. One might be tempted to combine the CPU and DSP in something like a cell phone, but it strikes me that simple screen updates, button handling, and other standard chores would impinge on the proceesing ability of the CPU, requiring that the CPU be much larger and more expensive. That can be particularly problematic for cell phones because they have to run on such razor thin profit margins.
Then again, what do I know? I don't design them for a living. It just seems wasteful is all.:-)
(if you want a system that can adapt to new protocols - a software defined radio or SDR - you need to use a more general purpose part than the dedicated ICs for this)
That explains why you'd use a Digital Signal Processor instead of a hardware codec. It doesn't explain why you'd use a GP instead of a DSP.
Actually, YES, the embedded market that needs 2GHz chips - folks like me doing signal processing for communications, among other things.
I'm sorry, WHY are you doing DSP on a general purpose CPU again? Methinks that's the precise reason why DSP vector processors were invented...
Just in case you're being cheeky, comparing a 2GHz DSP to a 2GHz general purpose CPU is a bit disingenous, don't you think? I mean, DSPs can have their clocks ramped up to ungodly levels because they tend to need less sophitication in the silicon than their general purpose counterparts. But if you chose one a DSP processors for a DesktopOS (or even something like a network appliance), you'd get absolutely horrible performance.
What you say might be correct, except that the primary chips that were considered CISC (8086-80286) did not, to the best of my knowledge, make use of microcode logic. (This was also true of the Z-80 and many other CISC chips.) As I understand it, the Intel line used Random Logic all the way through the 286 chip.
The key difference between a RISC and a CISC chip was always that a RISC chip executed a single instruction per cycle, whereas a CISC chip could take more than one cycle per instruction. To the best of my understanding, this paradigm was at the silicon level, NOT the microcode level. In fact, a "pure" RISC design wouldn't have microcode at all, as such code is the anti-thesis of "one instruction per cycle". Instead, it's up to the compiler to generate more complex sets of instructions to make up for the lack of microcode. This gives the compiler an opportunity to reorganize the instructions to ensure maximum utilization of the superscalar silicon. (Note: This may be as simple as expanding the instructions one way, or as complex as Out-Of-Order Execution.)
Today, pretty much all experts agree that the terms RISC and CISC are meaningless. Most processors use a pipelined design that executes one pipeline stage per clock cycle. This gives an effective execution speed of one cycle per instruction, but a rather large latency consistent with the pipeline length. Microcode may then be used to translate formerly CISC or RISC instructions to real processor instructions. In CISC instruction sets, this means that multiple real instructions may execute for each microcode instruction executed.
Let's not even get started on SIMD changes the playfield altogether.
Actually, if you read the FreeDOS page, the FreeDOS author only requests that Dr. DOS Inc. do something about complying with the GPL. i.e. He's asking them to distribute a copy of the GNU General Public License with the software, and make an offer to provide the source code to anyone who asks, as per the GPL. So all that's really required (assuming they haven't changed the FreeDOS software) is that Caldera be ready to send people over to the FreeDOS site, and perhaps burn a CD or two for a fee.
The incredulous part of the whole thing is that the page makes it sound like a major step back for Dr. DOS. Instead of moving forward on the source base they have, they're moving backwards by kit-bashing a bunch of old OSS software and then trying to sell it. Or at least, that's what I got out of TFA.
To be really fair, RISC was made obsolete by superscalar architectures.
I'm sorry, but, HUH? Superscalar architectures were really only made possible by RISC platforms. In traditional CISC, the variety of instruction structure made it very difficult to order the instructions for multi-execution. Not to mention that the silicon was already rather convoluted in CISC structures, thus making it even more difficult to fit superscalar execution.
The truth is that RISC won out. And so did CISC. Make sense? Allow me to explain:
The key concept behind RISC was that it simplified the silicon sufficiently to ramp up the clock speed in exchange for requiring more instructions to perform the same task as CISC. Since a higher clock speed can more than make up for any per-instruction performance differences, the early 90's was ruled by high speed chips such as Alphas.
However, CISC chips retained several features, not the least of which was the ability to build a far simpler compiler. Thus a compromise was reached. Microcode was added to RISC chips, thus making them appear to be CISC chips. All the improvements in clock speed were retained, but the chip had an extra pipeline stage to convert a short CISC instruction into a long (and hopefully Superscalar!) set of RISC instructions.
And now you know why nearly every RISC chip in existence had Superscalar execution prior to it being added to the Pentium. (Sorry, but Intel was REALLY late to the game on most of this high-performance stuff. Fortunate for them, Intel has a rather massive R&D department that was able to develop combinations of experimental chip technology far faster than any of their competitors.)
It's a robot milker. The industry has had these for 10+ years now! Hell, I met several farmers who had these installed when I was working in the livestock genetics business 6-7 years ago. Yet suddenly it's a new thing because this robot runs Linux? Yeash.
If Slashdot wants to report about a new model of robot milker that runs Linux, then fine. But don't go making out like it's a revolutionary new concept.
BTW, slightly off-topic, but one of the biggest reasons why robot milkers took a long time to catch on has to do with the "preferred" genetic make-up. The industry had been breeding the cows with teets very close together because it made the cow look more streamlined. Then the robot milker comes along and requires that the teets have some space between so that the milker can properly locate them and attach. No idea if they've fixed this.
Also, robot milkers are apparently good for detecting problems with the cow. In anything but a very small herd, a farmer might not notice if a cow doesn't show up to be milked. But the robot milker keeps track and will flag any that don't show as needing to be checked for udder blockages.
China just doesn't want to pay royalty to the current patent holders.
I sorry, since when did China start respecting American patents? Or any IP rights? Last I knew, piracy was considered a huge problem in China specifically because IP rights were *not* protected.
Even if piracy is not an issue (which the rise in Chinese Patents may be taking a part in), why base your format on an existing patented format? Would that not make the format a derivitive filing? So they would be no better off in this area.
As I said, if China wants to design formats, that's fine. But they should be looking at the bigger picture of designing formats that they can export to the entire world, not force the the domestic market. The fact that patent concerns are obviously not the issue and that China has no plans to export their format suggests that the issue is political, not technological.
They aren't cutting themselves off, they are guaranteeing profits and not even have to even think about exporting cash.
Hardly. They have to force the producers of movies to support the Chinese format. And why would anyone support the Chinese format when everyone in China already has DVD or BluRay players? The government could force the market to only sell players that handled their format, but that would only serve to create a massive black market.
Explanation: they have the industrial capacity to still EXPORT any and all formats,in any quantity, anywhere, to anyone, so they don't care about "formats" except it's a market.
Eh? They're entertainment discs. The problem is foreign imports of movies, not exports. Foreign companies aren't going to bother with the Chinese format unless there's an incentive to do so. What's the incentive?
But, who will want to try and make a chinese standard disk and try to import it INTO china and expect to make a profit? Answer, no one.
Exactly.
See, they cover their humongous domestic market, plus the rest of the planet.
You're assuming again that China doesn't need to import movies. That's not such a good assumption. At the very least (given the rampant piracy) some people need to have players to transcode foreign discs into the Chinese format. Most likely, the Chinese people will continue to purchase DVD or Blueray players on the black market, and DVD or Bluray discs to go with them.
the parent is leaning more towards the idea that china has quite a big market domesically.
I understand that. My point is that they can't simply maintain themselves on their local market. Their need for commodities imports screws with their desire to close their borders.
Are you aware there's more than a billion people living in China?
Uh huh. Because entertainment exports have always been consistent with the size of the country, right?
Putting that aside, China needs food and a lot of it. As I understand the problem, a large portion of their land is unfarmable, and they've made poor use of the farmable land they have. As a result, they will always need to maintain imports of commodities.
The problem is that if they cut themselves off they will have an import/export deficit. There are two ways they can make up for that deficit:
1. Keep exports high enough to match imports. 2. Create wealth faster than it can be exported.
Currently China operates on number 1 while the US operates on number 2. If China wants to close their borders and control the standards, they'll need to fall into category 2. To fall into category 2, they need to have enough economic weight to make their money worth more than the countries they are purchasing food from. Getting there requires that they become an economic juggernaut. To become and economic juggernaut, you have to deal with the rest of the world. Having free and open trade with the rest of the world results in... (you guessed it) loss of control. Soon the Chinese people will watch Dallas on DVD and revolt against their government!
I honestly don't understand what China thinks it will accomplish. You don't become an economic juggernaut by taking steps to cut yourself off from the rest of the world. If China wants the economic benefits of creating standards rather than just using them, they need to create a standard that the rest of the world will adopt. That way *they* can control the standard and ensure its success.
Instead they're merely making an incompatible version of someone else's standard. Something which they have no real economic power to force. They can force it politically, but that would simply piss off "The People of China" that much more when they can't import any foreign entertainment. (Certainly, a big import/export for any first world country.)
The only thing I can say is that it's probably again about control. They aren't looking at the economic implications, they're looking at preventing ideas like "freedom", "democracy", and "Dallas" (I'm only half-way joking here) from being imported.
That's a specific specification. From the articles, I got the impression that he was referring to the generic term for technology protection measures. Otherwise he wouldn't have been using the plural form.
Slashdot Mirror
The key wording is except as authorized under regulations promulgated by the President and published in the Federal Register. I don't know what the current regulations are (I'm trying to find it on whitehouse.gov right now), but I'm thinking satirical newspapers are not included.
From Title 18, Section 713, Paragraph (b):So the question is, do the Onion editors want to go to jail?
The Onion can and WILL face criminal charges if they persist. This is NOT a matter of copyright law, it is a matter of CRIMINAL law. The Onion editors and/or writers WILL be prosecuted and sentenced if they persist on this route. There is no exception to this law other than obtaining permission from the Office of the President. Since they don't have that permission, they would do best to fix their seal in a hurry.
I will repeat myself. The Onion is WRONG. If they want to pursue this, it could become a matter of imprisionment for the Onion editors and/or writers. They do NOT want to mess with this.
I'm guessing that you're thinking of the appropriately name Themosphere. :-)
You're not paying attention. Stupid or not, parody or not, it doesn't matter. The Presidential Seal is protected by law , not trademark or copyright, and is REQUIRED to be used only by the Presidential Office. ANY inappropriate use cannot, will not, and should not be tolerated.
Given the LAW, the Onion is wrong on this one. Besides, it really wouldn't kill the Onion to make a parody seal instead of trying to co-opt the real seal.
Thought that the Presidential Seal was also in the public domain.
Not really. Making fiction that includes references to a President either current or past is protected by the fact that the person is considered a "public figure", and has thus consented to having works made about them.
The problem with the Presidential Seal is that it's intended to carry the full power and weight of the office of the President and is NOT allowed to be used for anything that the President's office does not directly stand behind.
This "parody" thus places the President's office in a bit of a bind. It's not that they necessarily mind the parody, but they cannot have the seal used inappropriately, even if it seems harmless enough. Yet by requesting its removal, they look like the bad guys to the public.
The best solution I can think of is that the Onion should develop a "fake" seal that conveys the fact that it's fake in some way, shape, or form. In that way they would also parody the seal along with the President himself. This would be covered by fair use, and would not cause any confusion with the real seal.
On Mars, everything is inherently well thermally insulated (which is bad when you need to radiate heat, but if you design your heat flows properly, utilizing waste heat right, you can create very thermally-efficient industrial processes)
;-)
I vote for turbopumps. 1/100th atom in, 10 atmospheres out. Should still be cool enough to absorb the waste heat by the time you're done, too.
(Yes, yes, I know. You're throwing away some of your efficiency doing that. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.)
If you can streach one cable to g-sync orbit, you can streach several.
;-) :-P
That's only if the carbon nanotube is sufficiently conductive. Regular copper wire or the like wouldn't have sufficient strength to span the distance. Also, it's quite possible that your line losses on such a cable would be nearly as bad as a cohesive energy beam.
And, if I am grokking this correctly, this line would be the temperature of geo-stationary orbit, or at least damn cold, and therefore super-conductors would be effective in slashing the need for repeater statations.
Put that right out of your mind. Space is not "cold", nor is it "hot". Think about it. "Heat" is the vibrational energy of a molecule, right? From this we know of three ways of transferring heat: Conduction, Convection, and Radiation. Since there's no cooler material in contact with the wire in space, the first two options are out. That leaves Radiation. Now to expend heat via radiation, the object needs to get *hot*, not cold. Once it warms to a sufficient temperature, it will begin to glow in the infrared spectrum. (This is where most space equipment cools.) When it warms to a greater temperature, it will glow "red-hot" across the lower spectrum. Eventually (if heat is not dumped fast enough) it will get "white-hot" and emit thermal radiation across a rather wide spectrum, thus producing visible white light.
I wonder if there would be a pd between the top of the cable and the bottom?
No.
Free power, cool...
That should have been your first clue.
Fair enough. But it still seems like you're replacing a rather inexpensive part ($1-$5 DSP or $3-$10 FPGA) with a God-awefully expensive CPU ($20-$50). Perhaps you're making up by combining enough hardware? Also, doesn't a regular processor like a PowerPC or x86 significantly complicate the Bus design? A lot of embedded hardware tend to use a custom bus, or at least a far simpler design than a Desktop PC. Unless you have a customized CPU with simpler pinouts, you're going to need a bus similar to the one the CPU is expecting.
It used to be that only DSPs had the fast barrel shifters for single-cycle shifts of more than one bit position - now most CPUs have them.
I was under the impression that barrel shifters were relatively uncommon on CPUs. For example, the Pentium IV actually removed the hardware barrel shifter that had been added to the original Pentium, and reimplemented it in microcode. Google is being unhelpful at the moment, but I seem to remember that the PowerPC either lacked a barrel shifter, or that the performance was considered sub-par. Is this just my imagination?
Excellent point! In fact, most Space Elevator proponents seem to miss the fact that the energy for the elevator isn't free. You still have to expend at least the minimum amount of energy required to move an object into LEO. The physics of the situation say there are no shortcuts.
What you DO gain is:
a) Slower ascent
b) Only minor (if not inconseqential) losses from air friction
c) Ability to expend the power over a long period of time vs. in a huge controlled explosion
d) A workable descent mode that doesn't require that the hull handle extremes
I'm all for the space elevator idea. However, a lot of people need to understand that this is NOT existing technology. While it's very much possible for the necessary breakthroughs to be completed in the next few decades, dropping everything and working on a Space Elevator would only mean that we'd lose space access for a very long time. That is why NASA is pursuing the CEV and not the Space Elevator as the next major launch vehicle.
SIMD instructions have a lot in common with DSPs. In fact, they really are an attempt to add DSP features to a General Purpose processor with the intent of running multimedia through the main CPU. This has been particularly useful for things like software video players, but CPUs of today still have a hard time competing with dedicated hardware like an MPEG2 hardware codec.
Sounds a) expensive and b) slow. If you just need pluggable codecs, it seems to me that DSPs would be cheaper and faster. One might be tempted to combine the CPU and DSP in something like a cell phone, but it strikes me that simple screen updates, button handling, and other standard chores would impinge on the proceesing ability of the CPU, requiring that the CPU be much larger and more expensive. That can be particularly problematic for cell phones because they have to run on such razor thin profit margins.
:-)
Then again, what do I know? I don't design them for a living. It just seems wasteful is all.
(if you want a system that can adapt to new protocols - a software defined radio or SDR - you need to use a more general purpose part than the dedicated ICs for this)
That explains why you'd use a Digital Signal Processor instead of a hardware codec. It doesn't explain why you'd use a GP instead of a DSP.
Actually, YES, the embedded market that needs 2GHz chips - folks like me doing signal processing for communications, among other things.
I'm sorry, WHY are you doing DSP on a general purpose CPU again? Methinks that's the precise reason why DSP vector processors were invented...
Just in case you're being cheeky, comparing a 2GHz DSP to a 2GHz general purpose CPU is a bit disingenous, don't you think? I mean, DSPs can have their clocks ramped up to ungodly levels because they tend to need less sophitication in the silicon than their general purpose counterparts. But if you chose one a DSP processors for a DesktopOS (or even something like a network appliance), you'd get absolutely horrible performance.
What you say might be correct, except that the primary chips that were considered CISC (8086-80286) did not, to the best of my knowledge, make use of microcode logic. (This was also true of the Z-80 and many other CISC chips.) As I understand it, the Intel line used Random Logic all the way through the 286 chip.
The key difference between a RISC and a CISC chip was always that a RISC chip executed a single instruction per cycle, whereas a CISC chip could take more than one cycle per instruction. To the best of my understanding, this paradigm was at the silicon level, NOT the microcode level. In fact, a "pure" RISC design wouldn't have microcode at all, as such code is the anti-thesis of "one instruction per cycle". Instead, it's up to the compiler to generate more complex sets of instructions to make up for the lack of microcode. This gives the compiler an opportunity to reorganize the instructions to ensure maximum utilization of the superscalar silicon. (Note: This may be as simple as expanding the instructions one way, or as complex as Out-Of-Order Execution.)
Today, pretty much all experts agree that the terms RISC and CISC are meaningless. Most processors use a pipelined design that executes one pipeline stage per clock cycle. This gives an effective execution speed of one cycle per instruction, but a rather large latency consistent with the pipeline length. Microcode may then be used to translate formerly CISC or RISC instructions to real processor instructions. In CISC instruction sets, this means that multiple real instructions may execute for each microcode instruction executed.
Let's not even get started on SIMD changes the playfield altogether.
Actually, if you read the FreeDOS page, the FreeDOS author only requests that Dr. DOS Inc. do something about complying with the GPL. i.e. He's asking them to distribute a copy of the GNU General Public License with the software, and make an offer to provide the source code to anyone who asks, as per the GPL. So all that's really required (assuming they haven't changed the FreeDOS software) is that Caldera be ready to send people over to the FreeDOS site, and perhaps burn a CD or two for a fee.
The incredulous part of the whole thing is that the page makes it sound like a major step back for Dr. DOS. Instead of moving forward on the source base they have, they're moving backwards by kit-bashing a bunch of old OSS software and then trying to sell it. Or at least, that's what I got out of TFA.
To be really fair, RISC was made obsolete by superscalar architectures.
I'm sorry, but, HUH? Superscalar architectures were really only made possible by RISC platforms. In traditional CISC, the variety of instruction structure made it very difficult to order the instructions for multi-execution. Not to mention that the silicon was already rather convoluted in CISC structures, thus making it even more difficult to fit superscalar execution.
The truth is that RISC won out. And so did CISC. Make sense? Allow me to explain:
The key concept behind RISC was that it simplified the silicon sufficiently to ramp up the clock speed in exchange for requiring more instructions to perform the same task as CISC. Since a higher clock speed can more than make up for any per-instruction performance differences, the early 90's was ruled by high speed chips such as Alphas.
However, CISC chips retained several features, not the least of which was the ability to build a far simpler compiler. Thus a compromise was reached. Microcode was added to RISC chips, thus making them appear to be CISC chips. All the improvements in clock speed were retained, but the chip had an extra pipeline stage to convert a short CISC instruction into a long (and hopefully Superscalar!) set of RISC instructions.
And now you know why nearly every RISC chip in existence had Superscalar execution prior to it being added to the Pentium. (Sorry, but Intel was REALLY late to the game on most of this high-performance stuff. Fortunate for them, Intel has a rather massive R&D department that was able to develop combinations of experimental chip technology far faster than any of their competitors.)
It's a robot milker. The industry has had these for 10+ years now! Hell, I met several farmers who had these installed when I was working in the livestock genetics business 6-7 years ago. Yet suddenly it's a new thing because this robot runs Linux? Yeash.
If Slashdot wants to report about a new model of robot milker that runs Linux, then fine. But don't go making out like it's a revolutionary new concept.
BTW, slightly off-topic, but one of the biggest reasons why robot milkers took a long time to catch on has to do with the "preferred" genetic make-up. The industry had been breeding the cows with teets very close together because it made the cow look more streamlined. Then the robot milker comes along and requires that the teets have some space between so that the milker can properly locate them and attach. No idea if they've fixed this.
Also, robot milkers are apparently good for detecting problems with the cow. In anything but a very small herd, a farmer might not notice if a cow doesn't show up to be milked. But the robot milker keeps track and will flag any that don't show as needing to be checked for udder blockages.
China just doesn't want to pay royalty to the current patent holders.
I sorry, since when did China start respecting American patents? Or any IP rights? Last I knew, piracy was considered a huge problem in China specifically because IP rights were *not* protected.
Even if piracy is not an issue (which the rise in Chinese Patents may be taking a part in), why base your format on an existing patented format? Would that not make the format a derivitive filing? So they would be no better off in this area.
As I said, if China wants to design formats, that's fine. But they should be looking at the bigger picture of designing formats that they can export to the entire world, not force the the domestic market. The fact that patent concerns are obviously not the issue and that China has no plans to export their format suggests that the issue is political, not technological.
They aren't cutting themselves off, they are guaranteeing profits and not even have to even think about exporting cash.
Hardly. They have to force the producers of movies to support the Chinese format. And why would anyone support the Chinese format when everyone in China already has DVD or BluRay players? The government could force the market to only sell players that handled their format, but that would only serve to create a massive black market.
Explanation: they have the industrial capacity to still EXPORT any and all formats,in any quantity, anywhere, to anyone, so they don't care about "formats" except it's a market.
Eh? They're entertainment discs. The problem is foreign imports of movies, not exports. Foreign companies aren't going to bother with the Chinese format unless there's an incentive to do so. What's the incentive?
But, who will want to try and make a chinese standard disk and try to import it INTO china and expect to make a profit? Answer, no one.
Exactly.
See, they cover their humongous domestic market, plus the rest of the planet.
You're assuming again that China doesn't need to import movies. That's not such a good assumption. At the very least (given the rampant piracy) some people need to have players to transcode foreign discs into the Chinese format. Most likely, the Chinese people will continue to purchase DVD or Blueray players on the black market, and DVD or Bluray discs to go with them.
the parent is leaning more towards the idea that china has quite a big market domesically.
I understand that. My point is that they can't simply maintain themselves on their local market. Their need for commodities imports screws with their desire to close their borders.
Are you aware there's more than a billion people living in China?
:-P
Uh huh. Because entertainment exports have always been consistent with the size of the country, right?
Putting that aside, China needs food and a lot of it. As I understand the problem, a large portion of their land is unfarmable, and they've made poor use of the farmable land they have. As a result, they will always need to maintain imports of commodities.
The problem is that if they cut themselves off they will have an import/export deficit. There are two ways they can make up for that deficit:
1. Keep exports high enough to match imports.
2. Create wealth faster than it can be exported.
Currently China operates on number 1 while the US operates on number 2. If China wants to close their borders and control the standards, they'll need to fall into category 2. To fall into category 2, they need to have enough economic weight to make their money worth more than the countries they are purchasing food from. Getting there requires that they become an economic juggernaut. To become and economic juggernaut, you have to deal with the rest of the world. Having free and open trade with the rest of the world results in... (you guessed it) loss of control. Soon the Chinese people will watch Dallas on DVD and revolt against their government!
Viva la Dallas!
I honestly don't understand what China thinks it will accomplish. You don't become an economic juggernaut by taking steps to cut yourself off from the rest of the world. If China wants the economic benefits of creating standards rather than just using them, they need to create a standard that the rest of the world will adopt. That way *they* can control the standard and ensure its success.
Instead they're merely making an incompatible version of someone else's standard. Something which they have no real economic power to force. They can force it politically, but that would simply piss off "The People of China" that much more when they can't import any foreign entertainment. (Certainly, a big import/export for any first world country.)
The only thing I can say is that it's probably again about control. They aren't looking at the economic implications, they're looking at preventing ideas like "freedom", "democracy", and "Dallas" (I'm only half-way joking here) from being imported.
Trusted Platform Module.
That's a specific specification. From the articles, I got the impression that he was referring to the generic term for technology protection measures. Otherwise he wouldn't have been using the plural form.