More likely the Directory is responding because huge donors to the administration stand to lose if this patent is upheld.
It is possible, but over the years most of the pressure on the USPTO has come from patent barons and the lawfirms who service them lobbying to keep the rules loose.
I see this more as a recognition by the patent baron donors that trying to defend the Eolas patent might end up as the catalyst to wider reforms which would hurt their interests.
Excuse me for trusting my former President and a Saudi Prince over Arafat.
You know that really is a pretty ironic comment when you think about it. I have not met Prince Bandar, but I know the Saudi regime quite well. It is every bit as miserable as Saddam's regime in Iraq, the secret police are brutal, the courts capricious, critics of the regime tend to 'disappear'. On top of that you have the imposition of Whahabbi Islam, a miserable cult, in a form that is only slightly less severe than that of the Saudi funded Taliban.
The Saudi regime has a big interest in making sure that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict remains nicely on the boil so that they can direct their internal conflict onto an external source.
If you read what the Saudi government and press say about the situation inside Saudi I suspect you would have a different view of the reliability of the royal family.
As for Clinton, you are picking and choosing. Clinton has stated on numerous occassions that the settlements are 'obstacles to peace'.
or maybe without US political pressure backed by US aid, Israel could finally let its army loose on the palestinians and end the conflict a lot faster ?
OK how many civilians do you want to murder with that army?
What you are advocating here is ethnic cleansing, what we called genocide in WWII.
If Sharon ever took that path the number of people who wanted Israel to continue as a political entity would suddenly become very small.
There is only one long term political solution that is viable. Simply erase all the clauses in Israeli law and the constitution that privillege the position of Jews over other citizens. That means ending the law of return for jews and recognizing the law of return for Palestinian refugees. Eliminate all subsidies to religious institutions and enact anti-discrimination laws.
That is the only way that we brought the conflict in Northern Ireland to an end. If Britain had been more attentive to what was taking place in Northern Ireland in the 50s and 60s and less defferential to local politicians we would have taken the same action before they could be exploited by the radicals.
Director ordered re-exams are rare, a few hundred a year. They tend to only take place when the USPTO is absolutely forced to.
In this case the director is responding to a public request made by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web on behalf of the 600 odd companies in his consortium. This is the type of request that the director of the USPTO can hardly afford to ignore.
There are other ways to obtain a re-examination. Anyone can file at any time by paying a fee. The problem is that the re-exam process tends to be as prefunctory as the exam process and if you lose at re-exam the courts are likely to reject challenges based on the material presented in the re-exam.
I suspect that we will see the Eolas patent quickly evaporate. Director ordered re-exams in the middle of littigation are highly unusual. The trigger for obtaining a director ordered re-exam is considerably higher than the threshold for invalidating a patent.
As it appears to upset you that Israel is using what you call 'coded references' does it also upset you what the PA does?
It is clear that Sharon is the causal nexus here, as he is fond of pointing out Arafat is irrelevant.
Sharon's strategy appear to be to deliberately provoke attacks in order to justify further provocations. He was personally responsible for starting the current round of violence with his forced entry into the Al Axir mosque.
Sharon is personally responsible for all the deaths since. He has brought nothing but death, fear and instability to Israel.
Every time there is a ceasefire with the militants, Sharon makes sure it ends quickly by ordering the airforce to murder some Palestinians.
List of countries on the Israeli side: USA
List of countries on the PA side: Most/All of the Arab world.
Make that pretty much the entire world condeming Israel. At this point the only countries that support Israel in the UN are the US, Israel(!), Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.
If Israel wants any sympathy from me they can stop confiscating Palestinan land to build settlements. Israel signed an agreement to stop building settlements at Oslo, instead of keeping the agreement they doubled the number of houses.
The U.S. aid to Israel is only several percent of Israel's gross national product.
Israel currently receives over half of all US aid. If Israel can do without that aid I am sure that the US taxpayer would be only too happy to stop paying for it.
The fact is that the Israeli economy is in the tank and almost certain to stay there. The military budget is crippling, added to which there are huge subsidies to various religious factions that have to be bought off and for building 'settlements' on land confiscated from Palestinians.
Without US aid and US weapons the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would be a much more evenly balanced affair. Israeli hawks might actually start thinking of compromise rather than using coded references to 'transfer' - i.e. ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.
Stolen? There are only a few superpowers in the world that have the technology to maintain and use such a device
Since when has Israel been anything more than a regional power? Nobody calls France, Britain or Germany superpowers and their military capabilities are far superior.
Most likely reason for the theft would be espionage. There are quite a few governments who would pay to find out what the capabilities of the prototype are, including France, Russia, Iran, China. My guess is that the navigation electronics have already been removed and are on their way to Paris or Tehran by way of the diplomatic bag.
Question is why anyone would want a helicopter drone. Helicopters are pretty fragile and prone to attack from the ground. Thanks to the proliferation of the stinger missile (in which Israel played an active part) there are plenty of groups with the capability to take out helicopters.
Of course there might not be such a need for this type of weapon if Israel stopped being a 'jewish; state and instead became an 'equality' state. I opposed the South African appartheid 'white' state and I oppose the Israeli appartheid 'jewish' state for the same reason - any state that gives one group of citizens a privilleged position inevitably makes every other citizen second class.
I am fed up with the twisted logic that says that there is a right to a jewish state, then defines that state as one that has the right to erase all other citizens rights. Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is as disgusting as the US treatment of its native population and we see the same tactic. First the Indian's land was stolen by settlers by force, then when the Indians attempted to take matters into their own hands and respond with force this was used to 'justify' further confiscations.
We all know the game Sharon is playing and where it will lead.
Israel relies on US military hardware and goodwill in a wide range of areas. No surprise there.
And at present a third of the Israeli air force is grounded because of an arms embargo by my country, the UK. The sole source for power packs for the ejector seats used in their older jets has been prohibited from exporting replacements.
From a strategic point of view there is no reason to avoid dependence on US arms exports since the Israeli ecconomy is entirely dependent on the US.
Let me pose this question: Does any company (other then Apple ) run ads for a dual processor personal computer in the UK, particularly one targeted at home users?
The ad Apple ran did not say 'fastest personal computer sold to people to use at home, but not as fast as other machines that are the same price but are mainly sold to a different buyer'.
If Apple had sold the machine as the prettiest high performance machine on the market they would have had a point. Viglen sell largely to the home and education markets. They specialize in low cost machines for individual use and bulk sales to and through universities.
My claim was not that you can't get dual processor intel systems, but that if you call up any x86 vendor and ask for a personal computer, you won't be presented with the option of a dual processor configuration.
Untrue, look at Viglen.co.uk. They offer a Genie Pro2 machine that has a dual processor option.
Viglen is one of the largest UK distributors. Since we are talking about an ad banned in the UK for being unture that would seem to rebutt your claim.
Call up viglen and ask them for a high performance personal computer costing in the region of GBP2000 and they will offer you that machine.
Price does not determine market entirely. The motherboard you chose was not probobly not developed for the general personal computing market.
So the fact that I can buy a machine that is faster, cheaper and more configurable is irrelevant because it is 'not built for the general personal computing market'?
Hogwash! Any machine that is on the bleeding edge performance wise is not going to be a general market machine - particularly not the G5 which sells to a niche within a niche. Going for extreme performance more than doubles the price of the machine, I can pick up a perfectly OK single processor box for $1,200. The ONLY reason to spend more is if you are doing something that is NOT general purpose. Wait nine months and the $1,200 boxes will have caught up.
As for buying 'pieces', the company concerned put together both my last 2 machines and shipped them to me complete for an extra $50. I would have self assembled but they really prefer to do it themselves since then we know who bent the pins on the CPU or whatever else might go wrong in self assembly.
I think you Apple folks are really clutching at straws here.
I just did some surfing, for $750 you can buy a bare frame with motherboard and PSU that will take dual 3.2 MHz Xeon processors. It should be possible to fully kit out the machine for $3K all in, even if you go for insane amounts of RAM and a high end video card.
And yes, $3K is definitely a personal machine. Its the same as Apple want for their G5.
The slight of hand here is that Apple is classifying the competition as being something different. Basically the Apple definition of PC seems to be 'any computer less powerful than our flagship'.
The UK Advertising council does not accept half truths.
The claim is that the G5 is the fastest personal computer. It'd dual processor @ 2GHz. Last I checked you couldn't get a personal dual processor system for the x86 platform.
I have two in my house. One of them is so old (Pentium Pro) that I have yanked the motherboard out of the case and recycled it with a new motherboard. My main coding machine is a three year old dual Pentium III 650MHz box. That is also getting long in the tooth.
I would not bother with a dual processor machine to replace it since the bottleneck for my applications is not the CPU, its the memory/CPU interface and the disk drives, not raw CPU speed.
The definition of 'Personal Computer' is usually accepted to be computer for personal rather than shared use. By that criteria my machine definitely counts since it is speced the way it is to be used for video editing, it was hardly unusual at the time. Equally there are plenty of folk with dual processor intel boxes under their desks - I believe it is the standard setup for our engineering dept.
Put the crack pipe down. Games consoles run games not "graphics applications", and in games, floating point calculations are vital.
How many processors have you designed? Thought so.
The fact that a feature might be 'vital' does not mean that it is 'vital' to provide a single instruction highly optimised to implement it.
You do not need to have a full feature FPU with a full width barrel shift register, you have to justify that by showing that the expenditure of the gates results in faster games.
Nobody would program for a fixed-point only console nowadays. It's acceptable for hand-held systems but not for consoles. They'd laugh you off the stage at GDC...
Back in the early days of RISC the same was being said of the idea of breaking down the CPU, eliminating complex instructions.
My point is that you have a very different set of tradeoffs going on to those in a general purpose PC. The main reason PCs have FPUs is to run benchmarks, if you look at the work most PCs do they don't really need them.
The real question is just how much stuff you can fit onto a single CPU chip. It is pretty certain that you want to integrate the GPU and the CPU. The on-chip/off-chip delay is going to be a major bottleneck. That does not leave a great deal to eliminate.
The way to settle the matter is not to flame on slashdot, take some actual games and compile the damn things for a range of simulated hardware options. That is actually what we used to do in the early days of RISC, the compilers were optimized to the code, (at first to the end user code, later on the benchmarks:-)
Sure you may think that floating point is essential for games, but it is a completely different question to ask whether the best way to spend your gates budget is on a slick full feature FPU.
I have to think about 9) Pilots for major airlines
I think they are all pretty dodgy, if you believe in the free market then most of these jobs should automatically settle to a fair rate, they are mostly independent contractor affairs.
Take wedding photographer, you can have someone do a hack job for $50 an hour, or you can get a professional team in for $2000. I went the professional team route, we got 500 odd prints plus the negatives for $3500, taken by a team of two. Of course we could have spent more, but that is why we had an organizer, to make sure that we got good contractors and they did their job properly and for a fair price.
Airline pilots get paid well because they are professionals who work distinctly unsocial hours. Incidentally while airlines major costs are labor costs the cost of pilots is pretty much chickenfeed. There are two pilots on modern jets, occasionally 4 for a really long haul flight. A large jet will have ten or more stewards and be serviced by a ground crew with another ten, maintenance crew, etc, etc.
Equally somewhat ironic to hear about west coast longshoremen drooling over healthcare benefits that are distinctly inferior to those of Canada or the UK.
Skycaps!!! - hey you don't HAVE to give them huge tips! Like if you think that the base salary is plenty then don't overtip.
There are some real scams, like the entire estate agent/realtor industry which charges about four times what it should. Go to the UK and you will find estate agents listing about 200+ houses as sole agents. In the US you will have those same 200 houses divided up amongst 8 or more realtors.
As for athletes, I really could care less about a persons ability to take drugs fast.
They also have a point about ex-politicians on the lecture circuit. I heard Guilliani speak. An amazing disappointment. Instead of reaching out to the audience and looking for common ground he just gave what could have easilly been a Republican party stump speech, complete with partisan jibes against Clinton etc. My respect for him went way down, we were at an industry conference on Homeland Security wanting to hear his insight, Bush good, Clinton bad is not insight, its the party line. We can hear that on Fox for free, so what is with the $150 a seat ticket?
Ditto for the CEOs and mutual fund managers, how can we discuss dockworkers being overpaid when there are folk who are giving themselves seven, eight nine figure salaries.
Incidentally, why are consultants missing from the list? I mean if the longshoremen and pilots are suspect then what about the $5,000 per day I used to charge on the consulting circuit? Admittedly I didn't get the dosh personally, but I probably would have no shortage of takers come an uptick in the economy,
More than 5 years have passed since floating point units were not critical to 3D applications.
In most graphics applications fixed point calculations are far more important. I suspect you can probably lose quite a bit of the FPU in exchange for on-chip access to the GPU.
do they want to lose per console this time? If they use re-engineered pc parts, they stand to lose a lot.
I doubt that they intend to do quite as much as some are claiming. I suspect that all they are going to do is to integrate standard cells for the processor and graphics processor onto the same chip. Probably losing the FPU in the process and some other stuff that is not much use on a dedicated graphics machine - or at least not enough use to want to spend silicon on it.
The PC has been dancing close to the line where a PC on a chip becomes possible for some time. This has happened before of course, Inmos did it in the 1980s, but then you got 4Kb or Ram per transputer. Today you can get a CPU, Graphics processor and 2Mb of cache onto a chip without too much pain.
The costs of going custom are not that great for the production runs involved. We are talking tens of millions of chips. So the cost of some custom masks is really not that big of a problem. Microsoft hae to pay for the processor IP whether they use it as a standard cell or buy it in as a commodity.
The support chips will probably still be commodity items - but remember that there are a lot of things you just do not need on a game box that are vital for a PC, things like protected memory, virtual memory etc. They take up a lot of real estate but you don't need them in a game box.
I doubt any Microsoft solution could honestly compete with the scalability and reliability of a true mainframe,
Oh I think they could, just write the code in COBOL and you can be pretty certain that it will be fragile and bug ridden, particularly if you run 30 plus year old code that nobody has the source for.
Mainframe hardware can be pretty reliable - particularly if you compare against some of the crappy stuff sold by wannabees. But it is certainly not infalible and you can certainly get high end intel class boxes that are easily a match reliability wise. As for mainframe O/S being reliable I have to snigger there, there is no way to know how reliable MVS is, the operator will make so many errors that any the system makes will be lost in the noise. Reliability should be measured for the system as a whole, MVS creates so many opportunities for an operator to botch things up it isn't funny.
Microfocus has been in the cobol business for at least 20 years, what the story is about is being able to use Visual Studio as a development environment. That is pretty big news since only a complete masochist would want to develop code in an MVS environment. Unless you have tried Visual Studio, don't knock it, it leaves emacs in the dust.
I am not sure that Visual Cobol is going to be a great programming environment, a lot of the Visual C# features are made possible by the language design. But if you are going to endure the misery of cobol it is probably the best way to do it.
I suspect that a fair number of programmers would use the package to gradually migrate systems from Cobol on Mainframe to Cobol on dotNET to Cobol with SQL backend on dotNET to full C#/Java code with SQL backend.
I mostly object to filtering software on public school/public library machines, but I really don't see any reason why filtering software is nessisary at all.
I use the parental control feature on my Sony Wega to stop my parents turning Fox News on when they visit.
I find exposure to Murdoch's lies to be unpleasant and unnecessary. Filtering out this right wing crap from my house gives me a sense of inner peace and calm.
Britain forced the American colonies to pay unfair taxes and engage in uncompetitive trade with them and we didn't turn into a tyrannical state that has murdered millions of it's own citizens.
Some would take issue with that claim, native Americans and victims of the slave trade for one. Ever heard of the trail of tears?
I give China a lot of credit for what its government does. I might not agree with it, but they're upfront about their censorship and their control (suppression) over their citizens. It would be refreshing if other governments had the same sense of honesty about citizens' "freedom," but I doubt we'll see it.
You sound like Rupert Murdoch. Oh it does not matter if they are dictators, business is business. Oh and get used to the same at home, comming to you soon courtesy of John Ashcroft.
China is not in a good political situation, even the comrades in charge are worried by it. Censorship and repression is not a sign of political stability, it is an indication of chronic instability.
The two factors that have the comrades scared stiff are fear of foreign, particularly Japanesse and US interference, and fear of a repeat of the cultural revolution. What they would ideally like to do is to transition to a stable western style democracy - the problem is how to get from A to B and without western interference.
Before poo-poohing the fear of western influence take a look at the history. The reason China is in the way it is is because of a series of foreign interventions starting with the British who invaded several times to protect their Opium trade - i.e. to force the Chineese to allow drug sales. Next there was the US 'open door' policy which carved the country up into a series of foreign controlled territories, finally handing control of the country over to Japan as thanks for help in WWI.
Slashdot Mirror
It is possible, but over the years most of the pressure on the USPTO has come from patent barons and the lawfirms who service them lobbying to keep the rules loose.
I see this more as a recognition by the patent baron donors that trying to defend the Eolas patent might end up as the catalyst to wider reforms which would hurt their interests.
You know that really is a pretty ironic comment when you think about it. I have not met Prince Bandar, but I know the Saudi regime quite well. It is every bit as miserable as Saddam's regime in Iraq, the secret police are brutal, the courts capricious, critics of the regime tend to 'disappear'. On top of that you have the imposition of Whahabbi Islam, a miserable cult, in a form that is only slightly less severe than that of the Saudi funded Taliban.
The Saudi regime has a big interest in making sure that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict remains nicely on the boil so that they can direct their internal conflict onto an external source.
If you read what the Saudi government and press say about the situation inside Saudi I suspect you would have a different view of the reliability of the royal family.
As for Clinton, you are picking and choosing. Clinton has stated on numerous occassions that the settlements are 'obstacles to peace'.
OK how many civilians do you want to murder with that army?
What you are advocating here is ethnic cleansing, what we called genocide in WWII.
If Sharon ever took that path the number of people who wanted Israel to continue as a political entity would suddenly become very small.
There is only one long term political solution that is viable. Simply erase all the clauses in Israeli law and the constitution that privillege the position of Jews over other citizens. That means ending the law of return for jews and recognizing the law of return for Palestinian refugees. Eliminate all subsidies to religious institutions and enact anti-discrimination laws.
That is the only way that we brought the conflict in Northern Ireland to an end. If Britain had been more attentive to what was taking place in Northern Ireland in the 50s and 60s and less defferential to local politicians we would have taken the same action before they could be exploited by the radicals.
Director ordered re-exams are rare, a few hundred a year. They tend to only take place when the USPTO is absolutely forced to.
In this case the director is responding to a public request made by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web on behalf of the 600 odd companies in his consortium. This is the type of request that the director of the USPTO can hardly afford to ignore.
There are other ways to obtain a re-examination. Anyone can file at any time by paying a fee. The problem is that the re-exam process tends to be as prefunctory as the exam process and if you lose at re-exam the courts are likely to reject challenges based on the material presented in the re-exam.
I suspect that we will see the Eolas patent quickly evaporate. Director ordered re-exams in the middle of littigation are highly unusual. The trigger for obtaining a director ordered re-exam is considerably higher than the threshold for invalidating a patent.
It is clear that Sharon is the causal nexus here, as he is fond of pointing out Arafat is irrelevant.
Sharon's strategy appear to be to deliberately provoke attacks in order to justify further provocations. He was personally responsible for starting the current round of violence with his forced entry into the Al Axir mosque.
Sharon is personally responsible for all the deaths since. He has brought nothing but death, fear and instability to Israel.
Every time there is a ceasefire with the militants, Sharon makes sure it ends quickly by ordering the airforce to murder some Palestinians.
List of countries on the Israeli side: USA List of countries on the PA side: Most/All of the Arab world.
Make that pretty much the entire world condeming Israel. At this point the only countries that support Israel in the UN are the US, Israel(!), Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.
If Israel wants any sympathy from me they can stop confiscating Palestinan land to build settlements. Israel signed an agreement to stop building settlements at Oslo, instead of keeping the agreement they doubled the number of houses.
Israel currently receives over half of all US aid. If Israel can do without that aid I am sure that the US taxpayer would be only too happy to stop paying for it.
The fact is that the Israeli economy is in the tank and almost certain to stay there. The military budget is crippling, added to which there are huge subsidies to various religious factions that have to be bought off and for building 'settlements' on land confiscated from Palestinians.
Without US aid and US weapons the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would be a much more evenly balanced affair. Israeli hawks might actually start thinking of compromise rather than using coded references to 'transfer' - i.e. ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.
Since when has Israel been anything more than a regional power? Nobody calls France, Britain or Germany superpowers and their military capabilities are far superior.
Most likely reason for the theft would be espionage. There are quite a few governments who would pay to find out what the capabilities of the prototype are, including France, Russia, Iran, China. My guess is that the navigation electronics have already been removed and are on their way to Paris or Tehran by way of the diplomatic bag.
Question is why anyone would want a helicopter drone. Helicopters are pretty fragile and prone to attack from the ground. Thanks to the proliferation of the stinger missile (in which Israel played an active part) there are plenty of groups with the capability to take out helicopters.
Of course there might not be such a need for this type of weapon if Israel stopped being a 'jewish; state and instead became an 'equality' state. I opposed the South African appartheid 'white' state and I oppose the Israeli appartheid 'jewish' state for the same reason - any state that gives one group of citizens a privilleged position inevitably makes every other citizen second class.
I am fed up with the twisted logic that says that there is a right to a jewish state, then defines that state as one that has the right to erase all other citizens rights. Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is as disgusting as the US treatment of its native population and we see the same tactic. First the Indian's land was stolen by settlers by force, then when the Indians attempted to take matters into their own hands and respond with force this was used to 'justify' further confiscations.
We all know the game Sharon is playing and where it will lead.
And at present a third of the Israeli air force is grounded because of an arms embargo by my country, the UK. The sole source for power packs for the ejector seats used in their older jets has been prohibited from exporting replacements.
From a strategic point of view there is no reason to avoid dependence on US arms exports since the Israeli ecconomy is entirely dependent on the US.
The ad Apple ran did not say 'fastest personal computer sold to people to use at home, but not as fast as other machines that are the same price but are mainly sold to a different buyer'.
If Apple had sold the machine as the prettiest high performance machine on the market they would have had a point. Viglen sell largely to the home and education markets. They specialize in low cost machines for individual use and bulk sales to and through universities.
Untrue, look at Viglen.co.uk. They offer a Genie Pro2 machine that has a dual processor option.
Viglen is one of the largest UK distributors. Since we are talking about an ad banned in the UK for being unture that would seem to rebutt your claim.
Call up viglen and ask them for a high performance personal computer costing in the region of GBP2000 and they will offer you that machine.
So the fact that I can buy a machine that is faster, cheaper and more configurable is irrelevant because it is 'not built for the general personal computing market'?
Hogwash! Any machine that is on the bleeding edge performance wise is not going to be a general market machine - particularly not the G5 which sells to a niche within a niche. Going for extreme performance more than doubles the price of the machine, I can pick up a perfectly OK single processor box for $1,200. The ONLY reason to spend more is if you are doing something that is NOT general purpose. Wait nine months and the $1,200 boxes will have caught up.
As for buying 'pieces', the company concerned put together both my last 2 machines and shipped them to me complete for an extra $50. I would have self assembled but they really prefer to do it themselves since then we know who bent the pins on the CPU or whatever else might go wrong in self assembly.
I think you Apple folks are really clutching at straws here.
And yes, $3K is definitely a personal machine. Its the same as Apple want for their G5.
The slight of hand here is that Apple is classifying the competition as being something different. Basically the Apple definition of PC seems to be 'any computer less powerful than our flagship'.
The UK Advertising council does not accept half truths.
I have two in my house. One of them is so old (Pentium Pro) that I have yanked the motherboard out of the case and recycled it with a new motherboard. My main coding machine is a three year old dual Pentium III 650MHz box. That is also getting long in the tooth.
I would not bother with a dual processor machine to replace it since the bottleneck for my applications is not the CPU, its the memory/CPU interface and the disk drives, not raw CPU speed.
The definition of 'Personal Computer' is usually accepted to be computer for personal rather than shared use. By that criteria my machine definitely counts since it is speced the way it is to be used for video editing, it was hardly unusual at the time. Equally there are plenty of folk with dual processor intel boxes under their desks - I believe it is the standard setup for our engineering dept.
So no, the G5 claim does not wash.
How many processors have you designed? Thought so.
The fact that a feature might be 'vital' does not mean that it is 'vital' to provide a single instruction highly optimised to implement it.
You do not need to have a full feature FPU with a full width barrel shift register, you have to justify that by showing that the expenditure of the gates results in faster games.
That is what RISC is all about.
Back in the early days of RISC the same was being said of the idea of breaking down the CPU, eliminating complex instructions.
My point is that you have a very different set of tradeoffs going on to those in a general purpose PC. The main reason PCs have FPUs is to run benchmarks, if you look at the work most PCs do they don't really need them.
The real question is just how much stuff you can fit onto a single CPU chip. It is pretty certain that you want to integrate the GPU and the CPU. The on-chip/off-chip delay is going to be a major bottleneck. That does not leave a great deal to eliminate.
The way to settle the matter is not to flame on slashdot, take some actual games and compile the damn things for a range of simulated hardware options. That is actually what we used to do in the early days of RISC, the compilers were optimized to the code, (at first to the end user code, later on the benchmarks :-)
Sure you may think that floating point is essential for games, but it is a completely different question to ask whether the best way to spend your gates budget is on a slick full feature FPU.
I think they are all pretty dodgy, if you believe in the free market then most of these jobs should automatically settle to a fair rate, they are mostly independent contractor affairs.
Take wedding photographer, you can have someone do a hack job for $50 an hour, or you can get a professional team in for $2000. I went the professional team route, we got 500 odd prints plus the negatives for $3500, taken by a team of two. Of course we could have spent more, but that is why we had an organizer, to make sure that we got good contractors and they did their job properly and for a fair price.
Airline pilots get paid well because they are professionals who work distinctly unsocial hours. Incidentally while airlines major costs are labor costs the cost of pilots is pretty much chickenfeed. There are two pilots on modern jets, occasionally 4 for a really long haul flight. A large jet will have ten or more stewards and be serviced by a ground crew with another ten, maintenance crew, etc, etc.
Equally somewhat ironic to hear about west coast longshoremen drooling over healthcare benefits that are distinctly inferior to those of Canada or the UK.
Skycaps!!! - hey you don't HAVE to give them huge tips! Like if you think that the base salary is plenty then don't overtip.
There are some real scams, like the entire estate agent/realtor industry which charges about four times what it should. Go to the UK and you will find estate agents listing about 200+ houses as sole agents. In the US you will have those same 200 houses divided up amongst 8 or more realtors. As for athletes, I really could care less about a persons ability to take drugs fast.
They also have a point about ex-politicians on the lecture circuit. I heard Guilliani speak. An amazing disappointment. Instead of reaching out to the audience and looking for common ground he just gave what could have easilly been a Republican party stump speech, complete with partisan jibes against Clinton etc. My respect for him went way down, we were at an industry conference on Homeland Security wanting to hear his insight, Bush good, Clinton bad is not insight, its the party line. We can hear that on Fox for free, so what is with the $150 a seat ticket?
Ditto for the CEOs and mutual fund managers, how can we discuss dockworkers being overpaid when there are folk who are giving themselves seven, eight nine figure salaries.
Incidentally, why are consultants missing from the list? I mean if the longshoremen and pilots are suspect then what about the $5,000 per day I used to charge on the consulting circuit? Admittedly I didn't get the dosh personally, but I probably would have no shortage of takers come an uptick in the economy,
In most graphics applications fixed point calculations are far more important. I suspect you can probably lose quite a bit of the FPU in exchange for on-chip access to the GPU.
I doubt that they intend to do quite as much as some are claiming. I suspect that all they are going to do is to integrate standard cells for the processor and graphics processor onto the same chip. Probably losing the FPU in the process and some other stuff that is not much use on a dedicated graphics machine - or at least not enough use to want to spend silicon on it.
The PC has been dancing close to the line where a PC on a chip becomes possible for some time. This has happened before of course, Inmos did it in the 1980s, but then you got 4Kb or Ram per transputer. Today you can get a CPU, Graphics processor and 2Mb of cache onto a chip without too much pain.
The costs of going custom are not that great for the production runs involved. We are talking tens of millions of chips. So the cost of some custom masks is really not that big of a problem. Microsoft hae to pay for the processor IP whether they use it as a standard cell or buy it in as a commodity.
The support chips will probably still be commodity items - but remember that there are a lot of things you just do not need on a game box that are vital for a PC, things like protected memory, virtual memory etc. They take up a lot of real estate but you don't need them in a game box.
Oh I think they could, just write the code in COBOL and you can be pretty certain that it will be fragile and bug ridden, particularly if you run 30 plus year old code that nobody has the source for.
Mainframe hardware can be pretty reliable - particularly if you compare against some of the crappy stuff sold by wannabees. But it is certainly not infalible and you can certainly get high end intel class boxes that are easily a match reliability wise. As for mainframe O/S being reliable I have to snigger there, there is no way to know how reliable MVS is, the operator will make so many errors that any the system makes will be lost in the noise. Reliability should be measured for the system as a whole, MVS creates so many opportunities for an operator to botch things up it isn't funny.
Microfocus has been in the cobol business for at least 20 years, what the story is about is being able to use Visual Studio as a development environment. That is pretty big news since only a complete masochist would want to develop code in an MVS environment. Unless you have tried Visual Studio, don't knock it, it leaves emacs in the dust.
I am not sure that Visual Cobol is going to be a great programming environment, a lot of the Visual C# features are made possible by the language design. But if you are going to endure the misery of cobol it is probably the best way to do it.
I suspect that a fair number of programmers would use the package to gradually migrate systems from Cobol on Mainframe to Cobol on dotNET to Cobol with SQL backend on dotNET to full C#/Java code with SQL backend.
I use the parental control feature on my Sony Wega to stop my parents turning Fox News on when they visit.
I find exposure to Murdoch's lies to be unpleasant and unnecessary. Filtering out this right wing crap from my house gives me a sense of inner peace and calm.
Some would take issue with that claim, native Americans and victims of the slave trade for one. Ever heard of the trail of tears?
Actually its only 363 feet or so vertically - you should be safe in the capsule on the top of the damn thing without getting pulverized.
Read the last Neilsen report - they only give out the basic data for free. The detailed breakdown by income is a paid subscription thing.
You sound like Rupert Murdoch. Oh it does not matter if they are dictators, business is business. Oh and get used to the same at home, comming to you soon courtesy of John Ashcroft.
China is not in a good political situation, even the comrades in charge are worried by it. Censorship and repression is not a sign of political stability, it is an indication of chronic instability.
The two factors that have the comrades scared stiff are fear of foreign, particularly Japanesse and US interference, and fear of a repeat of the cultural revolution. What they would ideally like to do is to transition to a stable western style democracy - the problem is how to get from A to B and without western interference.
Before poo-poohing the fear of western influence take a look at the history. The reason China is in the way it is is because of a series of foreign interventions starting with the British who invaded several times to protect their Opium trade - i.e. to force the Chineese to allow drug sales. Next there was the US 'open door' policy which carved the country up into a series of foreign controlled territories, finally handing control of the country over to Japan as thanks for help in WWI.
I have a Doctorate from Oxford University Nuclear Physics Laboratory.
You want to continue this?
Moral - do not challenge people to dick size measuring contests on Slashdot. Some of us don't need the products advertised by the spammers.