You obviously haven't paid much attention to license statements in a lot of commercial software. Every large piece of commercial software I've run has been accompanied by docs with a long list of "Portions Copyright xxxx by yyyyy". Even Microsoft Windows uses code copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California, among others.
Indeed. The article really makes no sense, someone would have to look up the specific clause in Sarbanes-Oxley they're referring to. Does the law require companies to disclose who the IP owners are of all the IP that a company uses? (That would be insane. I have no idea who owns patent #314159265 on the dinner fork I just used in the cafeteria, why should I even care?)
Interesting find. Of course, IBM didn't announce those chips until a month after Apple announced they were switching to Intel. Perhaps those chips simply weren't going to be available soon enough.
The Infoworld article quoted 13W at 1.4GHz and 16W at 1.6GHz, with the chip maxing out at 2.5GHz in this revision. Your 23W @ 2.0GHz may be a bit too high.
Nonsense. (As is most of TFA.) I got into programming simply because I wanted to play with computers. No economic motivation, and no particular need that I was looking for a vendor to fill. Plenty of people pursue a particular path in life simply because that is what they want to do. (Though of course, the vast majority of people into computing these days jumped in it for the money. Fools.)
I have stayed on the Free Software side of the world because I believe in it. People who say "there are no little green men" probably piss the hell out of the little green men. People who say there is no ideological movement behind Free Software and try to paint the world solely in the money terms that they identify with really piss the hell out of me.
As my brother once told me: "Money is how people without talent keep score."
Yes, it's *possible*, even *probable* but not certain. As for dead-on similar, that doesn't prove anything. Laws of physics have a certain way of dictating what are the best approaches to certain problems. Put another way, just how many ways are there to write a "Hello, World" program, assuming a constrained set of programming languages? Assuming just one language?
And then there's the other valid point that pretty much nothing occurs in a vacuum, most of innovation occurs as a broad continuum, building endlessly on what came before. So why should we be singling out minute spots for preferential treatment, when they're all just fleeting moments on the journey of progress?
That's why we have a "sync" command. On Unix/Linux, you have complete control over whether to favor cache or to favor disk consistency. On Windows, you have no choice, you're stuck with whatever policy Microsoft dictates to you. I think that accurately reflects the state of affairs at all levels.
They probably have a strong case in current law, but that doesn't make this Right. There's still the concept of independent discovery that our patent laws disregard. If I've never heard of you, never read your work, never talked to anyone who's heard of you or your work, etc., then why do I owe you anything for independently arriving at the same idea you did, using my own brainpower and resources? There's a fair likelihood that since Solomon's market is marine technology, that Toyota did develop their design completely independently. So now someone's going to come along and say "hey, all that R&D you poured into that idea - that's all mine now, thank you very much." Nonsense.
Patents as a right to a monopoly should be done away with completely. Once again, there is no intrinsic value in "Intellecutal Property." An idea, a story, a song, a brand name - none of that has any value to society until it is disseminated into society. The only thing of consequence in "IP" is the Intellect. People deserve recognition for their creativity. If the USPTO merely served as a central repository for creative output, to give due credit to all the creative geniuses out there, that should be enough. In that context, the whole notion of "transferability" is meaningless. All that should be important is an official affirmation "Jane Doe discovered this Really Cool Thing on this date." I.e., the only thing that should matter here is prestige for the creator, and an overall benefit to society.
You can't buy respect, why should you be able to buy and sell the products of genius? Makes no sense. Companies can still market on "IP" of course... "Our bread slicer is officially blessed by the inventor herself! Don't buy those cheap imitations made by clueless buggers who can barely read! Buy the original!" The fact that having invented something makes you authoritative on the subject is really what's powerful here. Again, Intellect is greater than Intellectual Property. Even when you jettison the useless notion of property creators will still get their due.
For their test rig, NAND flash yields 8.8MB/sec writes vs NOR at 0.14MB/sec. That's why NOR flash is only used for BIOS memory and other things you don't have to rewrite very often. On the flip side, NAND flash gets reads at 16.5MB/sec vs NOR at 23.9MB/sec (or 108MB/sec, presumably in some kind of burst mode - that part isn't explained).
If their OneNAND performs as well as they claim, I could see using it for a boot drive; 68MB/sec read would be fine there, 9.3MB/sec write would be ok as long as you weren't paging to it or doing much of anything else. Linux would run pretty well with those parameters, its buffer cache is good at absorbing and deferring writes; Windows 2K/XP's memory manager/cache manager purges pages too aggressively though, which would make the write throughput a serious system bottleneck.
You're comparing apples and oranges. The solid state disks you're referring to all use regular DRAM with battery backup. DRAM is a few thousand times faster than flash.
Flash-based drives aren't even up to UDMA66 speed yet. For notebooks, my 60G Hitachi 7200rpm drive will be faster than flash in every situation.
Are there really more application development projects out there than there are code gurus? From a distant perspective, I think not; I think there are only a small number of vertically integrated industries out there and a lot of companies reinventing the wheel in each of those industries. If more software development was done in an open, collaborative fashion, solutions would only have to be written once for each of those target industries, and you'd only need to hire a handful of the sharpest programmers to get them done. The rest of the warm-bodies can go find careers they're actually good at, instead of bringing down the quality level of the software industry overall.
I do. But then again, I write for OpenLDAP, and most of my code is free already, so this is nothing unusual. There's freeware out there I wrote 20 years ago still being used around the world, and yes, last year I wrote a fix for that for free too. In this case, I think 1 bug in 18 years isn't so bad.
That's an interesting point. From the article, Pluto receives about 1/1000th as much sunlight as the Earth. From here http://www.powerfromthesun.net/chapter1/Chapter1.h tm we see that the Earth receives 1367 watts per square meter, so we can assume that Pluto typically receives only 1.367 watts per square meter. Dumping the heat from a single P4EE into Pluto's surface could be pretty disruptive, hundreds of watts over a small surface area. The rush of nitrogen vapor would be like a bomb exploding.
But supposing one actually wanted to design a computer system that could operate on the surface of Pluto, I'm sure the heatsink design wouldn't be the worst problem. Just mount the CPU so that the heat-spreader is mated to the case, and sit the case on the planet surface. I don't know the thermal conductivity of frozen solid nitrogen, but I have a feeling it will be adequate. The heat of vaporization will take care of the rest.
it's just the sort of place you'd need to run a few Pentium Extreme Edition systems.
But seriously, while researchers try to find exotic materials that exhibit room-temperature superconductivity, you could take more common materials and run them at insanely fast speeds out there. Of course, it would take a while to upload your code and data and download any processing results.......
Maybe the dark side of Mercury would be more feasible.
Indeed. Setting up defense funds for indemnification isn't going to solve the problem. While the patent system itself is broken and needs to be fixed, a better short term use of those funds would be to throw it into resources to review and challenge as many patents as possible. This needs to be a two-pronged attack - one, to sift through all of the published applications and challenge them before they get issued, and two, to sift through existing patents that clearly should have failed on whatever grounds.
Anybody can file an anonymous protest against a patent application before it issues, so all it takes is assigning people to read the apps and make the challenges. Companies taking out "defensive patents" are missing the point, filing for new junk patents to defend against other junk patents only makes the problem worse. Those patent lawyers ought to be earning their money invalidating junk patents, not filing new ones.
OpenLDAP didn't stall, RedHat just continued to ship the same antiquated release years after it was decommissioned by everyone else. OpenLDAP has gotten a ton of undeserved bad press over the past 5 years largely thanks to RedHat never updating the version they bundled.
Re:Publicly Acknowledge the Wrong and Fire the Exe
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 1
Fire nothing. These executives belong in jail. The people involved acted intentionally, despite the fact that their actions violate a number of privacy and computer security laws.
That's all I was referring to. I found it pretty unpleasant, after using it to sweeten a fruit punch mix. It seems you really need a lot of sweetener to make a soft drink taste good.
I've been using Xylitol products for the past couple years. (Xylitol+fluoride toothpaste, gum, mints, granular sugar replacement...) Results are mixed. The toothpaste is good, the mints are good for clearing up ear and throat infections. The gum seems least effective to me; I think part of the problem is that its full load of xylitol is released too quickly. Bacteria in the mouth reproduce incredibly fast. Even when you've used mouthwash and killed 99.9% of them, they're back in full force in a couple of hours. (It's that stupid geometric growth working aginst you.) You need to have a sustained dose in your mouth to be effective. One thing about xylitol is that it promotes salivating, so it pretty much rinses itself away. With the mints, you know you're still getting a dose for as long as the mint is in your mouth. With the gum, you can be tasting the minty flavor for a long time after the xylitol effectiveness is gone.
The granular xylitol is kinda dangerous stuff. The label says you can use it as a 1:1 replacement for sucrose, but really if you take more than about a teaspoon at one time it will kill all the good bacteria in your intestines, and that will be a very unpleasant experience. (Trust me on this, you really don't want to find out firsthand.)
Given the SPECmarks for Itanium I'd say it does very well with its minimal pipeline, far better than any x86 design. Code density is a bit of a downside, but a bigger instruction cache would mostly fix that.
It seems to me that IBM has plenty of manufacturing capacity. So much goes unused that they hire out to other companies. The problem here wasn't lack of capacity, it was lack of importance. The number of PPC chips Apple buys is miniscule compared to all the other business IBM has going on. The biggest market for PowerPC architecture these days is in embedded systems, and the volumes there are many orders of magnitude greater than Apple will ever sell. It will be a shame when Apple drops the PPC and x86 is the only desktop architecture left, but the overall impact on PPC sales will be nil.
Yes, the x86 instruction set with all of its modifier bytes and everything else is grossly inefficient. Anyone who thinks instruction set doesn't affect overall performance is a moron. The fact that a complete x86 instruction's length varies wildly based on overrides and everything else makes instruction pre-fetching harder, makes instruction cache allocation harder, etc. etc... All the special tricks and silicon needed to overcome these difficulties aren't needed on a CPU with an orthogonal instruction set design, thus leaving more room in silicon for bigger caches, or various other features.
Even if x86 today is "RISC under the hood" it still pays a significant penalty in instruction decode time. Intel tries to hide this penalty by using longer pipelines, but it's a vicious cycle since they get hurt harder if their branch prediction misses. And again, all the silicon devoted to maintaining that 20 stage pipeline could instead be used for better gains on a system with a well-designed instruction set.
Think about it: when you have ALUs that can already do full multiplies and adds in only one cycle, you really don't need pipelining in the normal case. Instruction pre-fetch becomes dead-easy when you know that fetching 64 bytes always means you've got 16 instructions cached. Branch prediction is unnecessary when you know that you only have to pre-fetch 32 bits on either path of the branch to keep execution flowing without stalling. There is so much crap in an x86 chip today that is only there to mitigate the atrocious inefficieny of the instruction set. So much R&D resource in money and manpower has gone down this sink to make up for the problems. R&D resources that could have been more productively spent adding new capabilities to a good design. The state of the art in computer science has stagnated for decades thanks to Intel.
Apple wasn't going to have completed the Intel transition till 2007 anyway, so it's not like the timing is a huge problem. The dual-core PA Semi chip is supposed to be out first, 3Q06; I'm sure Apple could have worked up a design from preliminary specs by then. Think of how many new features they could have added to MacOSX in the meantime if they didn't have a bunch of their development staff bogged down porting to Intel and writing all that futile anti-hack stuff.
On a slight tangent... When I was in engineering college, part of what they tried to instill was a code of ethics. To be a good engineer meant more than just knowing the formulas and applying them, but applying them to positive causes. Basically, to remember that being an engineer is about creating solutions to improve the world.
If I were an engineer at Sony or Microsoft or Apple, I would have quit my job long ago and gone to a competitor or started a new company. I just can't imagine an eager young engineer being handed an assignment "ok, your job is to cripple the product so that 90% of its usefulness is inaccessible" and taking that. How can they sleep at night, how can they face themselves in the mirror? I've never been too fond of Apple designs, but I've always admired the fact that they had a philosphy, an ideal, and principles that they stuck to. Where has that principle gone? There's plenty of people responding here that Apple hasn't ever been about the fastest chips or the greatest bang for the buck, but about an esthetic. If that were still the case, then nobody (Apple or their customers) should be fussing over the current Powerbooks, they should be living up the Intel-free Apple lifestyle, and more Power to them.
When Sony Electronics had to bow down to Sony Pictures/Music/Entertainment, that Electronics division died. When Microsoft engineers were tasked to keep adding new features to Windows without paying attention to building a bulletproof core OS, the same. With Apple no longer having any Different Hardware, "Think Different" is essentially dead. When you give up your innovation and integrity, whatever else you may have follows it out the door...
There are fast low-power PPC architecture chips out there (like PA Semi) that Apple could use if they wanted. It seems silly to jump to as pathetic an architecture as Intel, at *any* stage in the game.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously haven't paid much attention to license statements in a lot of commercial software. Every large piece of commercial software I've run has been accompanied by docs with a long list of "Portions Copyright xxxx by yyyyy". Even Microsoft Windows uses code copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California, among others.
Indeed. The article really makes no sense, someone would have to look up the specific clause in Sarbanes-Oxley they're referring to. Does the law require companies to disclose who the IP owners are of all the IP that a company uses? (That would be insane. I have no idea who owns patent #314159265 on the dinner fork I just used in the cafeteria, why should I even care?)
Interesting find. Of course, IBM didn't announce those chips until a month after Apple announced they were switching to Intel. Perhaps those chips simply weren't going to be available soon enough.
The Infoworld article quoted 13W at 1.4GHz and 16W at 1.6GHz, with the chip maxing out at 2.5GHz in this revision. Your 23W @ 2.0GHz may be a bit too high.
Nonsense. (As is most of TFA.) I got into programming simply because I wanted to play with computers. No economic motivation, and no particular need that I was looking for a vendor to fill. Plenty of people pursue a particular path in life simply because that is what they want to do. (Though of course, the vast majority of people into computing these days jumped in it for the money. Fools.)
I have stayed on the Free Software side of the world because I believe in it. People who say "there are no little green men" probably piss the hell out of the little green men. People who say there is no ideological movement behind Free Software and try to paint the world solely in the money terms that they identify with really piss the hell out of me.
As my brother once told me: "Money is how people without talent keep score."
Yes, it's *possible*, even *probable* but not certain. As for dead-on similar, that doesn't prove anything. Laws of physics have a certain way of dictating what are the best approaches to certain problems. Put another way, just how many ways are there to write a "Hello, World" program, assuming a constrained set of programming languages? Assuming just one language?
And then there's the other valid point that pretty much nothing occurs in a vacuum, most of innovation occurs as a broad continuum, building endlessly on what came before. So why should we be singling out minute spots for preferential treatment, when they're all just fleeting moments on the journey of progress?
That's why we have a "sync" command. On Unix/Linux, you have complete control over whether to favor cache or to favor disk consistency. On Windows, you have no choice, you're stuck with whatever policy Microsoft dictates to you. I think that accurately reflects the state of affairs at all levels.
They probably have a strong case in current law, but that doesn't make this Right. There's still the concept of independent discovery that our patent laws disregard. If I've never heard of you, never read your work, never talked to anyone who's heard of you or your work, etc., then why do I owe you anything for independently arriving at the same idea you did, using my own brainpower and resources? There's a fair likelihood that since Solomon's market is marine technology, that Toyota did develop their design completely independently. So now someone's going to come along and say "hey, all that R&D you poured into that idea - that's all mine now, thank you very much." Nonsense.
Patents as a right to a monopoly should be done away with completely. Once again, there is no intrinsic value in "Intellecutal Property." An idea, a story, a song, a brand name - none of that has any value to society until it is disseminated into society. The only thing of consequence in "IP" is the Intellect. People deserve recognition for their creativity. If the USPTO merely served as a central repository for creative output, to give due credit to all the creative geniuses out there, that should be enough. In that context, the whole notion of "transferability" is meaningless. All that should be important is an official affirmation "Jane Doe discovered this Really Cool Thing on this date." I.e., the only thing that should matter here is prestige for the creator, and an overall benefit to society.
You can't buy respect, why should you be able to buy and sell the products of genius? Makes no sense. Companies can still market on "IP" of course... "Our bread slicer is officially blessed by the inventor herself! Don't buy those cheap imitations made by clueless buggers who can barely read! Buy the original!" The fact that having invented something makes you authoritative on the subject is really what's powerful here. Again, Intellect is greater than Intellectual Property. Even when you jettison the useless notion of property creators will still get their due.
NOR flash is extremely slow for writes. This Samsung appnoteo ry/appnote/onenand_features_performance_051104.pdf
http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/Mem
compares I/O performance of the various technologies (the chart is on page 28, so scroll down...)
For their test rig, NAND flash yields 8.8MB/sec writes vs NOR at 0.14MB/sec. That's why NOR flash is only used for BIOS memory and other things you don't have to rewrite very often. On the flip side, NAND flash gets reads at 16.5MB/sec vs NOR at 23.9MB/sec (or 108MB/sec, presumably in some kind of burst mode - that part isn't explained).
If their OneNAND performs as well as they claim, I could see using it for a boot drive; 68MB/sec read would be fine there, 9.3MB/sec write would be ok as long as you weren't paging to it or doing much of anything else. Linux would run pretty well with those parameters, its buffer cache is good at absorbing and deferring writes; Windows 2K/XP's memory manager/cache manager purges pages too aggressively though, which would make the write throughput a serious system bottleneck.
You're comparing apples and oranges. The solid state disks you're referring to all use regular DRAM with battery backup. DRAM is a few thousand times faster than flash.
Flash-based drives aren't even up to UDMA66 speed yet. For notebooks, my 60G Hitachi 7200rpm drive will be faster than flash in every situation.
Are there really more application development projects out there than there are code gurus? From a distant perspective, I think not; I think there are only a small number of vertically integrated industries out there and a lot of companies reinventing the wheel in each of those industries. If more software development was done in an open, collaborative fashion, solutions would only have to be written once for each of those target industries, and you'd only need to hire a handful of the sharpest programmers to get them done. The rest of the warm-bodies can go find careers they're actually good at, instead of bringing down the quality level of the software industry overall.
I do. But then again, I write for OpenLDAP, and most of my code is free already, so this is nothing unusual. There's freeware out there I wrote 20 years ago still being used around the world, and yes, last year I wrote a fix for that for free too. In this case, I think 1 bug in 18 years isn't so bad.
That's an interesting point. From the article, Pluto receives about 1/1000th as much sunlight as the Earth. From here http://www.powerfromthesun.net/chapter1/Chapter1.h tm we see that the Earth receives 1367 watts per square meter, so we can assume that Pluto typically receives only 1.367 watts per square meter. Dumping the heat from a single P4EE into Pluto's surface could be pretty disruptive, hundreds of watts over a small surface area. The rush of nitrogen vapor would be like a bomb exploding.
It's no fun if you have to overthink it.
But supposing one actually wanted to design a computer system that could operate on the surface of Pluto, I'm sure the heatsink design wouldn't be the worst problem. Just mount the CPU so that the heat-spreader is mated to the case, and sit the case on the planet surface. I don't know the thermal conductivity of frozen solid nitrogen, but I have a feeling it will be adequate. The heat of vaporization will take care of the rest.
it's just the sort of place you'd need to run a few Pentium Extreme Edition systems.
But seriously, while researchers try to find exotic materials that exhibit room-temperature superconductivity, you could take more common materials and run them at insanely fast speeds out there. Of course, it would take a while to upload your code and data and download any processing results.......
Maybe the dark side of Mercury would be more feasible.
HP had to bury the Alpha because it put PA-RISC and everything from Intel utterly to shame.
Indeed. Setting up defense funds for indemnification isn't going to solve the problem. While the patent system itself is broken and needs to be fixed, a better short term use of those funds would be to throw it into resources to review and challenge as many patents as possible. This needs to be a two-pronged attack - one, to sift through all of the published applications and challenge them before they get issued, and two, to sift through existing patents that clearly should have failed on whatever grounds.
Anybody can file an anonymous protest against a patent application before it issues, so all it takes is assigning people to read the apps and make the challenges. Companies taking out "defensive patents" are missing the point, filing for new junk patents to defend against other junk patents only makes the problem worse. Those patent lawyers ought to be earning their money invalidating junk patents, not filing new ones.
OpenLDAP didn't stall, RedHat just continued to ship the same antiquated release years after it was decommissioned by everyone else. OpenLDAP has gotten a ton of undeserved bad press over the past 5 years largely thanks to RedHat never updating the version they bundled.
Fire nothing. These executives belong in jail. The people involved acted intentionally, despite the fact that their actions violate a number of privacy and computer security laws.
That's all I was referring to. I found it pretty unpleasant, after using it to sweeten a fruit punch mix. It seems you really need a lot of sweetener to make a soft drink taste good.
I've been using Xylitol products for the past couple years. (Xylitol+fluoride toothpaste, gum, mints, granular sugar replacement...) Results are mixed. The toothpaste is good, the mints are good for clearing up ear and throat infections. The gum seems least effective to me; I think part of the problem is that its full load of xylitol is released too quickly. Bacteria in the mouth reproduce incredibly fast. Even when you've used mouthwash and killed 99.9% of them, they're back in full force in a couple of hours. (It's that stupid geometric growth working aginst you.) You need to have a sustained dose in your mouth to be effective. One thing about xylitol is that it promotes salivating, so it pretty much rinses itself away. With the mints, you know you're still getting a dose for as long as the mint is in your mouth. With the gum, you can be tasting the minty flavor for a long time after the xylitol effectiveness is gone.
The granular xylitol is kinda dangerous stuff. The label says you can use it as a 1:1 replacement for sucrose, but really if you take more than about a teaspoon at one time it will kill all the good bacteria in your intestines, and that will be a very unpleasant experience. (Trust me on this, you really don't want to find out firsthand.)
Interestingly, Anandtech just published a decent article on the Itanium reinforcing some of these ideas.5 98
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Given the SPECmarks for Itanium I'd say it does very well with its minimal pipeline, far better than any x86 design. Code density is a bit of a downside, but a bigger instruction cache would mostly fix that.
It seems to me that IBM has plenty of manufacturing capacity. So much goes unused that they hire out to other companies. The problem here wasn't lack of capacity, it was lack of importance. The number of PPC chips Apple buys is miniscule compared to all the other business IBM has going on. The biggest market for PowerPC architecture these days is in embedded systems, and the volumes there are many orders of magnitude greater than Apple will ever sell. It will be a shame when Apple drops the PPC and x86 is the only desktop architecture left, but the overall impact on PPC sales will be nil.
Yes, the x86 instruction set with all of its modifier bytes and everything else is grossly inefficient. Anyone who thinks instruction set doesn't affect overall performance is a moron. The fact that a complete x86 instruction's length varies wildly based on overrides and everything else makes instruction pre-fetching harder, makes instruction cache allocation harder, etc. etc... All the special tricks and silicon needed to overcome these difficulties aren't needed on a CPU with an orthogonal instruction set design, thus leaving more room in silicon for bigger caches, or various other features.
Even if x86 today is "RISC under the hood" it still pays a significant penalty in instruction decode time. Intel tries to hide this penalty by using longer pipelines, but it's a vicious cycle since they get hurt harder if their branch prediction misses. And again, all the silicon devoted to maintaining that 20 stage pipeline could instead be used for better gains on a system with a well-designed instruction set.
Think about it: when you have ALUs that can already do full multiplies and adds in only one cycle, you really don't need pipelining in the normal case. Instruction pre-fetch becomes dead-easy when you know that fetching 64 bytes always means you've got 16 instructions cached. Branch prediction is unnecessary when you know that you only have to pre-fetch 32 bits on either path of the branch to keep execution flowing without stalling. There is so much crap in an x86 chip today that is only there to mitigate the atrocious inefficieny of the instruction set. So much R&D resource in money and manpower has gone down this sink to make up for the problems. R&D resources that could have been more productively spent adding new capabilities to a good design. The state of the art in computer science has stagnated for decades thanks to Intel.
Apple wasn't going to have completed the Intel transition till 2007 anyway, so it's not like the timing is a huge problem. The dual-core PA Semi chip is supposed to be out first, 3Q06; I'm sure Apple could have worked up a design from preliminary specs by then. Think of how many new features they could have added to MacOSX in the meantime if they didn't have a bunch of their development staff bogged down porting to Intel and writing all that futile anti-hack stuff.
On a slight tangent... When I was in engineering college, part of what they tried to instill was a code of ethics. To be a good engineer meant more than just knowing the formulas and applying them, but applying them to positive causes. Basically, to remember that being an engineer is about creating solutions to improve the world.
If I were an engineer at Sony or Microsoft or Apple, I would have quit my job long ago and gone to a competitor or started a new company. I just can't imagine an eager young engineer being handed an assignment "ok, your job is to cripple the product so that 90% of its usefulness is inaccessible" and taking that. How can they sleep at night, how can they face themselves in the mirror? I've never been too fond of Apple designs, but I've always admired the fact that they had a philosphy, an ideal, and principles that they stuck to. Where has that principle gone? There's plenty of people responding here that Apple hasn't ever been about the fastest chips or the greatest bang for the buck, but about an esthetic. If that were still the case, then nobody (Apple or their customers) should be fussing over the current Powerbooks, they should be living up the Intel-free Apple lifestyle, and more Power to them.
When Sony Electronics had to bow down to Sony Pictures/Music/Entertainment, that Electronics division died. When Microsoft engineers were tasked to keep adding new features to Windows without paying attention to building a bulletproof core OS, the same. With Apple no longer having any Different Hardware, "Think Different" is essentially dead. When you give up your innovation and integrity, whatever else you may have follows it out the door...
There are fast low-power PPC architecture chips out there (like PA Semi) that Apple could use if they wanted. It seems silly to jump to as pathetic an architecture as Intel, at *any* stage in the game.