The A380 was on the drawing boards and being planned for nearly 20 years before it took to the skies.
Things changed in the meantime. Markets changed.
Even though Airbus thought the VLT market would expand and Boeing thought it wouldn't, The A380 was needed as a halo product and its presence sells thousands of smaller Airbus products, just as the 747 sold thousands of smaller Boeing products.
Boeing got lucky with the 747 because it was first to market, in a market which has only ever needed 1500 747s to be made. The L1101 and DC10/11 were both intended to compete with it and their failure took the companies down.
Making a new aircraft model involves a lot of crystal ball gazing and the iron will to stick with a gamble.
A380s are profitable on almost all the routes they run - usually more profitable than smaller aircraft, but they're nowhere near as flexible and that hurts all but the most well-heeled operators.
The cost of the aircraft is in the noise compared to the cost of the fuel.
Over the last 15 years oil prices have been pretty low thanks to the price wars and global recession.
They're starting to climb again and at some point the hub-spoke model will start winning out again unless high speed rail and hyperloop make a miraculous network overnight.
As long as your nuclear plant is a giant steam bomb yes, but as long as it's giant steam bomb it needs water for cooling to achieve useful thermal efficiency and you'll find that rivers tend to follow ancient fault lines - even in Arizona (and how well will Arizona survive the next New Madrid sequence?)
There are better nuclear power methods that don't mix high pressure/temperature water with radioactives, don't waste 99.99% of the mined fuel, can load follow and can't be used for nuclear proliferation - and the US research on those methods were killed off in favour of.... Californian-based fast breeder reactors.
Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co.,LTD. - one of the world's largest makers of DVR/NVR/Camer software is shipping Linux distros on HiSilicon (Huawei) SoC hardware, adding proprietary software (which is riddled with GPL symbols) totally stonewalling all attempts to obtain source code and then complaining loudly that other people are stealing its software.
Yes, the same Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co.,LTD whose DVR software was the host for Mirai and friends - and whose "fixes" for this can be circumvented in less than a minute (they disabled telnetd, it can be reenabled via the web interface and the traversal attack is still there)
Here in the UK (which isn't exactly short of water most of the time), car washes must recycle their water. Their daily consumption is quite low
My consumption is about 11 cubic metres/6 months (about 2900 US gallons - 15g/day) and at least half of that is that is toilet flushes due to the ancient cistern (you can reduce the flush volume in older toilets but it tends to result in inefficient flushing.)
There are other factors to consider too, such as the cost of water vs the cost of "doing it another way" - and frequently "more water" is cheaper than "more energy"
Hypersaline brine can be either piped back to the sea with distributed release to prevent toxic concentrations in one spot, or fed to a salt farm.
There are a number of ways of desalinating and an environment like Cape Town (hot and lots of sun) is ideal for evaporation-style glasshouse setups rather than pressure-fed RO ones.
I forgot one to mention one other advantage of MMP.
Because of the low threshold to entry, it is inevitable that some of the "less whacky" of the whacky fringe get elected into parliament, which means they're now in the spotlight without having any political power to speak of.
This has usually resulted in the policies of these parties and the antics of their politicians being closely inspected - which has usually resulted in the removal of those politicians and in some cases the subsequent self-destruction of the parties.
In particular, many of these radical fringe parties with "moralistic" electoral platforms have been shown to be extremely hypocritical and exposure of these activities has been beneficial for the country as a whole, allowing national discussion of previously "taboo" subjects.
New Zealand's Christian Democrats rather famously "erased" all mentions of a couple of disgraced politicians (after they were found to have been involved in dodgy sexual activities with minors), resulting in the party effectively ceasing to exist in the following elections as their voters realised they'd been scammed and selected other, less extreme parties.
"Deutsch's point is that under AV or any low Gallagher Index systems there's no way for voters to vote to remove the third party from government."
And yet in New Zealand - a country which moved from FPTP to MMP - this _did_ happen. Voters _DO_ change the way they vote in a proportional system, even in a Westminster Democracy.
Even more illustrative of Deutsch's claim being entirely out to lunch is the fact that under MMP the New Zealand voting public managed to vote in such a manner that one party received an absolute majority (greater than 50% of the party votes cast) for several elections in a row.
FPTP elections are decided in a small number of marginal seats. People living in those have wildly disproproprotionate power over who governs a country and as a result one of the ways to throw elections is to encourage people sympathetic to your cause to move into such areas (This has been done - a kind of reverse Gerrymandering)
MMP is a mixture of two voting systems. The first is a seat-level "local" representation (FPTP) which selects about half the seats in parliament and the second a proportional vote to decide the "national" makeup of the government, where each party's proportion is topped up from the seats they won directly to the proportion of the votes received with seats allocated from a list. In prcatice, it is extremely rare for any politician who ends up in parliament to not have been competing for a seat somewhere even if they didn't win the seat in question (In practice, it's even rarer for them not to have been the second place in the seat they ran in and for the margin between 1 and 2 to have been close.)
MMP provides proportionality down to the "threshold" level (usually 2-5% of votes) and the threshold is usually chosen to provide stability - if set too low (below 2%) then you end up with a large number of single representatives from the whacky fringe and instability of the government (this is why the Italian government is unstable) due to changing alliegances.
The argument against 3rd parties is constantly bought up by people who think that there should only be 2 parties in parliament. The reality is that in the UK, the 2 "main" parties only account for 1/3 of the total vote each and the differences between them being in power are 1-2% (ie, 32 vs 34%) - meaning that whoever's in power, 2/3 of the electorate voted AGAINST them.
This decrease in seating from ~ 1/2 to ~1/3 of the total in the chamber is why the main two parties are traditionally deadset against MMP or other systems which provide good proportionality. It would mean the end of being able to drive through ideological extreme policies without needing the broad agreement of most of the chamber.
In practice, MMP and other proportional representation systems prevent governmental policies lurching between elections, due to the need for broad support on the more contentious policies.
You know when people are losing the argument on this because they bring up the issue of "Voting for the prime minister" - which is something that ONLY the members of parliament do.
Under all systems, voters vote for a _party_. The party selects its prime minister and is free to change that selection at any time. Some countries have a separate election for president, but that still has no bearing on who selects the Prime Minister (who is the parliamentary chosen delegate to report to the president or monarch).
In the UK (or any westminster democracy), as a technical matter parliament or voters do NOT select its prime minister anyway. The monarch/president does.
The monarch selects an individual parliamentarian, requests that he/she be the prime minister and asks him/her to form a government. The fact that parliament has already decided who will go and see the monarch to receive the question is a matter of expedience as the monarch is not going to ask anyone who doesn't have enough support in the first place.
One of the most effective way of stopping Gerrymandering is to have representation decided by state or nationwide proportional representation systems such as MMP - even if individual districts are gerrymandered the _overall_ proportionality of representatives is based on the votes of the body politic.
This kind of PR pretty much ensures no group can gain an absolute majority, which in turn requires cooperation and concensus to get things done and defangs Combat Politics
As I don't live in the USA, the FTC is not a path open to me.
HOWEVER, should someone with standing to file a complaint wish to do so, feel free.
I'll call it copyright trolling when the person concerned has reportedly collected in excess of €2 million, by going back to companies which were violating, have taken steps to remedy this, yet are asked to pay increasing sums of money to avoid court action - especially when the actual results of court action in Germany have been limited to preventing distribution of a product and reimbursement of legal + research costs.
This is why Mr McHardy has annoyed a lot of people and had his code excised from Netfilter.
"The fact that FPTP favours larger parties and punishes small ones is very much a feature, rather than a bug - its defenders would argue that the system is supposed to lead to a strong two-party system, "
Yes, but it ONLY works as intended where there _are_ two parties.
As soon as you introduce a strongish 3rd or several smaller parties the representation model intended in FPTP falls apart - which is why the UK has had several sitting governments in a row which only achieved 33% of the total votes cast.
The reason for this is that FPTP originated in an era _without_ political parties.
The UK attempted to palm off a slight tweak on FPTP about a decade back as "proportional representation" (it was the least proportional and most opaque of the 12 competing PR models but specifically did not disadvantage the 2 main parties) in a referendum on change, when the actual referendum questions should have been:
1: "Should we change away from FPTP?" 2: "If we do change away from FPTP, what model should we move to?"
Moving to a Mixed Member Proportional system as used in New Zealand or Germany would still provide stable government and encourage moving away from "Combat Politics" towards getting things done by concensus and the good of the country rather than vested interests.
"It was actually worse, with ridings (districts) becoming depopulated to the point where there were only a few voters and new population centres with no representation."
This is the textbook explanation of 18th century "rotten boroughs"
Automation of fastfood ordering is already happening.
It's relatively easy/cheap to do and doesn't (normally) affect hygiene standards (although it may increase security risks, given that counterdroids can pick up on potentially troublesome customers)
However - As many franchise holders are finding out the hard way, many customers don't like it and are starting to go elsewhere.
Automation of the backend (cooking, cleaning and packing) is a lot more expensive and likely to take some time. Robots to do physical work are not cheap. relatively inflexible and require constant cleaning in this kind of environment. Employees not cooking or serving are cleaning, whilst robots not cooking are idle.
Employers who replace burger flippers on cost grounds are likely to be the same ones who attempt to cut corners on cleaning and in the process generate food poisoning outbreaks with subsequent compensation payments far exceeding the savings.
The Cortex ranges are gathering decidedly unreduced instruction sets.
> b) x86 is CISC only in the instruction set. The processors themselves have had far more in common with RISC processors since the days of the Pentium Pro.
IIRC the original AMD K5 was a wrapped 29050 RISC processor with strapped on FPU (and it ran 50% faster than equivalent Intel CPUs for integer ops, which was what mattered most of the time)
The problem with having a massive instruction set is the increasing risk of errors in the conversion microcode, not all correctable. Intel CPUs may be RISC at their core but in their quest to try and beat out memory latencies (speculative prereading, etc) they got sloppy and now we're all paying the price.
If DRAM memory latencies were down in single digit nanoseconds for random access we wouldn't be having this entire thread because the insanely long pipelines wouldn't be needed. It's all very well clocking your ram at 3000MHz and getting out 8 words at a time, but when you have to wait a few ten/hundred-thousand CPU clocks for what you asked for, whatever you're doing has to wait too.
Ram has increasingly been the bottleneck for the last decade. At this point we need (affordable) lower latency system ram, not faster SSDs. A large chunk of CPU optimisation and complexity since 2002 has been geared at getting around unshortenable latencies. You can only get so far ahead of yourself before the wheels fall off.
Amongst other things I've been a commercial driver and seen the way real people drive on real roads - including ones that shouldn't be attempted with the vehicles in question. One of the biggest problems with human drivers is inability to read the conditions and pressing on regardless.
Assuming you're in the USA, you live in a country with a surprisingly high road death rate - much higher than we would tolerate in most parts of western europe - and that's despite the highway speeds and following distances on most roads here.
The funny thing is that I've watched how self-driving cars have progressed over the last few years and how they're learning to drive roads never encountered before (Google was unusual at first in insisting that cars be explicitly taught the roads they drive on). In general they do better under adverse conditions than humans do, because they take fewer risks.
The consistent arrogance of the human driver is to assume (s)he is a much better driver than in reality, and that cars have much shorter stopping distances or cornering limits than they actually have. There was an old joke in the 1990s that most cars know the laws of physics far better than their drivers ever will. Drivers who _do_ have advanced training tend to assume that makes them "safer" so they go faster and take even more risks. The reality is that we're unstable monkeys prone to driving extremely emotionally and should never be allowed direct control of high speed moving machinery as we tend to push it well beyond our abilities to cope when something finally goes wrong. Most people who think they're "safe" at high speeds show classic "tunnel vision" perception problems on the highway and "target fixation" on an out-of-control vehicle is one of the most common causes of collisions which should have been avoided. In cities, we get so focussed on one or two hazards (eg, a cyclist wobbling along a narrow shopping street in front of us, with cars parking or opening doors) that we can completely miss someone stepping onto a pedestrian crossing at amuch closer distance - or even register that the crossing is there.
In my opinion, drivers who think they're much better than any robot (or most humans) are the ones least likely to actually be so, in a classic Dunning-Kruger setup - they don't know what they don't know, unless they happen to be the real 1-2% Mikko Haakenan or Nikki Lauda, etc - and you'll find that such drivers are _very_ safe, considerate drivers when in general traffic.
Insurance statistics will drive adoption of automation when the robots are ready and in the meantime you can expect more and more driver aids to become mandatory/non-disableable. Arguing with actuaries is pointless and when the US NHTSA points to a 40% reduction in statistical crash rates in Teslas thanks to the driver aids (and an even greater reduction in injuries as crash energies have been lower than expected - particularly for car vs pedestrian impacts), they take notice.
Yes, you may find that manual control is available under limited circumstances (speed limited, etc) or higher insurance rates applying, but just as aircraft have long been able to fly themselves from runway to runway and some have progressed to being able to taxi to/from the gate as well, cars will inexorably take the same path.
Eventually, unlimited human control will only be allowed on closed or private roads or specialist tracks. You can also expect that being allowed to take control comes with stringent testing requirements far in excess of european requirements today (Most american drivers _fail_ their first european driving tests, no matter how much experience they may have) and with regular retesting to keep the license.
In 50 years we are likely to be looking back on 20th/early 21st century cars, in the same way we look at 1920s vehicles now, shake our heads and say "They used to let humans control those things? No wonder they had sky high death and injury rates!"
It predates me. This is running VMS for support of ancient spacecraft software. We had a farm of DS10s and DS20s at one point. The only reason it survives is that keeping it is cheaper than moving to a VMS emulation environment.
I know the history of the Itanium. Sat, watched and waited for it. x86 is a mess and needed replacement even then.
(Hell, we would have bought more alphas if we could, but x86 won the war on both the bang-per-buck front and being the default for the original PC. This isn't so much VHS beating Beta as a souped up, revved out audio cassette format beating Beta.)
Was bitterly disappointed when it showed up with stupidly high pricing, high power consumption and relatively poor performance figures that precluded us buying any, quite apart from the inability to actually get any in Europe for quite a while.
In the meantime AMD released x86-64 CPUs which solved the 4GB barrier, then Intel bowed to pressure and crosslicensed them. X86 Prices stayed low, relative performance kept climbing and Itanium effectively fell further and further behind, being repositioned from the idea of a general 64-bit server CPU to a high end one, then into niche spots like the Nonstops.
Itanium could have taken the market if Intel had been willing to sell it at a loss for a while. Yes there was resistance from the x86 desktop crowd but what ultimately sank it was the poor bang-per-buck it provided. Intel's marketing always seemed to lack conviction and once they crosslicensed x86-64, the writing was on the wall.
It's not as if it's the only Intel CPU that tanked over the years. The x86 is their moneymaker and what they've always come back to, despite its instruction set being a pile of fetid dingo kidneys. The sad truth is that they've never tried particularly hard to replace it because to do so would damage existing sales, even when they had better architectures to offer.
Slashdot Mirror
The A380 was on the drawing boards and being planned for nearly 20 years before it took to the skies.
Things changed in the meantime. Markets changed.
Even though Airbus thought the VLT market would expand and Boeing thought it wouldn't, The A380 was needed as a halo product and its presence sells thousands of smaller Airbus products, just as the 747 sold thousands of smaller Boeing products.
Boeing got lucky with the 747 because it was first to market, in a market which has only ever needed 1500 747s to be made. The L1101 and DC10/11 were both intended to compete with it and their failure took the companies down.
Making a new aircraft model involves a lot of crystal ball gazing and the iron will to stick with a gamble.
A380s are profitable on almost all the routes they run - usually more profitable than smaller aircraft, but they're nowhere near as flexible and that hurts all but the most well-heeled operators.
The cost of the aircraft is in the noise compared to the cost of the fuel.
Over the last 15 years oil prices have been pretty low thanks to the price wars and global recession.
They're starting to climb again and at some point the hub-spoke model will start winning out again unless high speed rail and hyperloop make a miraculous network overnight.
As long as your nuclear plant is a giant steam bomb yes, but as long as it's giant steam bomb it needs water for cooling to achieve useful thermal efficiency and you'll find that rivers tend to follow ancient fault lines - even in Arizona (and how well will Arizona survive the next New Madrid sequence?)
There are better nuclear power methods that don't mix high pressure/temperature water with radioactives, don't waste 99.99% of the mined fuel, can load follow and can't be used for nuclear proliferation - and the US research on those methods were killed off in favour of.... Californian-based fast breeder reactors.
As does nuclear-free Germany from France.
One example, with added chuntzpah:
Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co.,LTD. - one of the world's largest makers of DVR/NVR/Camer software is shipping Linux distros on HiSilicon (Huawei) SoC hardware, adding proprietary software (which is riddled with GPL symbols) totally stonewalling all attempts to obtain source code and then complaining loudly that other people are stealing its software.
Yes, the same Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co.,LTD whose DVR software was the host for Mirai and friends - and whose "fixes" for this can be circumvented in less than a minute (they disabled telnetd, it can be reenabled via the web interface and the traversal attack is still there)
Even if you can prove it, the costs for defending this kind of vexatious claim are high.
It's a legal system, not a justice system - and the law favours those with the deepest pockets.
"Did you count the car wash?"
Here in the UK (which isn't exactly short of water most of the time), car washes must recycle their water. Their daily consumption is quite low
My consumption is about 11 cubic metres/6 months (about 2900 US gallons - 15g/day) and at least half of that is that is toilet flushes due to the ancient cistern (you can reduce the flush volume in older toilets but it tends to result in inefficient flushing.)
There are other factors to consider too, such as the cost of water vs the cost of "doing it another way" - and frequently "more water" is cheaper than "more energy"
"This has been proposed before. It would be extremely expensive... but probably worthwhile. "
And whilst the US dithers, China is doing exactly that to solve its water problems.
Hypersaline brine can be either piped back to the sea with distributed release to prevent toxic concentrations in one spot, or fed to a salt farm.
There are a number of ways of desalinating and an environment like Cape Town (hot and lots of sun) is ideal for evaporation-style glasshouse setups rather than pressure-fed RO ones.
"Or 10 gallons if it's a Navy Shower"
When water restrictions really start to bite, you run the shower to get wet, stop, soap yourself and then run it enough to rinse off.
That can be done with as little as 2 gallons in total.
One question:
Where do you get the energy to run the desalination plants?
I forgot one to mention one other advantage of MMP.
Because of the low threshold to entry, it is inevitable that some of the "less whacky" of the whacky fringe get elected into parliament, which means they're now in the spotlight without having any political power to speak of.
This has usually resulted in the policies of these parties and the antics of their politicians being closely inspected - which has usually resulted in the removal of those politicians and in some cases the subsequent self-destruction of the parties.
In particular, many of these radical fringe parties with "moralistic" electoral platforms have been shown to be extremely hypocritical and exposure of these activities has been beneficial for the country as a whole, allowing national discussion of previously "taboo" subjects.
New Zealand's Christian Democrats rather famously "erased" all mentions of a couple of disgraced politicians (after they were found to have been involved in dodgy sexual activities with minors), resulting in the party effectively ceasing to exist in the following elections as their voters realised they'd been scammed and selected other, less extreme parties.
"Deutsch's point is that under AV or any low Gallagher Index systems there's no way for voters to vote to remove the third party from government."
And yet in New Zealand - a country which moved from FPTP to MMP - this _did_ happen. Voters _DO_ change the way they vote in a proportional system, even in a Westminster Democracy.
Even more illustrative of Deutsch's claim being entirely out to lunch is the fact that under MMP the New Zealand voting public managed to vote in such a manner that one party received an absolute majority (greater than 50% of the party votes cast) for several elections in a row.
FPTP elections are decided in a small number of marginal seats. People living in those have wildly disproproprotionate power over who governs a country and as a result one of the ways to throw elections is to encourage people sympathetic to your cause to move into such areas (This has been done - a kind of reverse Gerrymandering)
MMP is a mixture of two voting systems. The first is a seat-level "local" representation (FPTP) which selects about half the seats in parliament and the second a proportional vote to decide the "national" makeup of the government, where each party's proportion is topped up from the seats they won directly to the proportion of the votes received with seats allocated from a list. In prcatice, it is extremely rare for any politician who ends up in parliament to not have been competing for a seat somewhere even if they didn't win the seat in question (In practice, it's even rarer for them not to have been the second place in the seat they ran in and for the margin between 1 and 2 to have been close.)
MMP provides proportionality down to the "threshold" level (usually 2-5% of votes) and the threshold is usually chosen to provide stability - if set too low (below 2%) then you end up with a large number of single representatives from the whacky fringe and instability of the government (this is why the Italian government is unstable) due to changing alliegances.
The argument against 3rd parties is constantly bought up by people who think that there should only be 2 parties in parliament. The reality is that in the UK, the 2 "main" parties only account for 1/3 of the total vote each and the differences between them being in power are 1-2% (ie, 32 vs 34%) - meaning that whoever's in power, 2/3 of the electorate voted AGAINST them.
This decrease in seating from ~ 1/2 to ~1/3 of the total in the chamber is why the main two parties are traditionally deadset against MMP or other systems which provide good proportionality. It would mean the end of being able to drive through ideological extreme policies without needing the broad agreement of most of the chamber.
In practice, MMP and other proportional representation systems prevent governmental policies lurching between elections, due to the need for broad support on the more contentious policies.
You know when people are losing the argument on this because they bring up the issue of "Voting for the prime minister" - which is something that ONLY the members of parliament do.
Under all systems, voters vote for a _party_. The party selects its prime minister and is free to change that selection at any time. Some countries have a separate election for president, but that still has no bearing on who selects the Prime Minister (who is the parliamentary chosen delegate to report to the president or monarch).
In the UK (or any westminster democracy), as a technical matter parliament or voters do NOT select its prime minister anyway. The monarch/president does.
The monarch selects an individual parliamentarian, requests that he/she be the prime minister and asks him/her to form a government. The fact that parliament has already decided who will go and see the monarch to receive the question is a matter of expedience as the monarch is not going to ask anyone who doesn't have enough support in the first place.
One of the most effective way of stopping Gerrymandering is to have representation decided by state or nationwide proportional representation systems such as MMP - even if individual districts are gerrymandered the _overall_ proportionality of representatives is based on the votes of the body politic.
This kind of PR pretty much ensures no group can gain an absolute majority, which in turn requires cooperation and concensus to get things done and defangs Combat Politics
*sigh* That really does leave people vulnerable to hostile metadata collection (ISPs or governments in "less tolerant regiemes")
There has to be a better way to do this.
"I was thinking Tru-64"
We turned those ones off about a decade ago.... :)
As I don't live in the USA, the FTC is not a path open to me.
HOWEVER, should someone with standing to file a complaint wish to do so, feel free.
I'll call it copyright trolling when the person concerned has reportedly collected in excess of €2 million, by going back to companies which were violating, have taken steps to remedy this, yet are asked to pay increasing sums of money to avoid court action - especially when the actual results of court action in Germany have been limited to preventing distribution of a product and reimbursement of legal + research costs.
This is why Mr McHardy has annoyed a lot of people and had his code excised from Netfilter.
I've never used Yelp. It's seriously "not a thing" outside the USA>
"The fact that FPTP favours larger parties and punishes small ones is very much a feature, rather than a bug - its defenders would argue that the system is supposed to lead to a strong two-party system, "
Yes, but it ONLY works as intended where there _are_ two parties.
As soon as you introduce a strongish 3rd or several smaller parties the representation model intended in FPTP falls apart - which is why the UK has had several sitting governments in a row which only achieved 33% of the total votes cast.
The reason for this is that FPTP originated in an era _without_ political parties.
The UK attempted to palm off a slight tweak on FPTP about a decade back as "proportional representation" (it was the least proportional and most opaque of the 12 competing PR models but specifically did not disadvantage the 2 main parties) in a referendum on change, when the actual referendum questions should have been:
1: "Should we change away from FPTP?"
2: "If we do change away from FPTP, what model should we move to?"
Moving to a Mixed Member Proportional system as used in New Zealand or Germany would still provide stable government and encourage moving away from "Combat Politics" towards getting things done by concensus and the good of the country rather than vested interests.
"It was actually worse, with ridings (districts) becoming depopulated to the point where there were only a few voters and new population centres with no representation."
This is the textbook explanation of 18th century "rotten boroughs"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Automation of fastfood ordering is already happening.
It's relatively easy/cheap to do and doesn't (normally) affect hygiene standards (although it may increase security risks, given that counterdroids can pick up on potentially troublesome customers)
However - As many franchise holders are finding out the hard way, many customers don't like it and are starting to go elsewhere.
Automation of the backend (cooking, cleaning and packing) is a lot more expensive and likely to take some time. Robots to do physical work are not cheap. relatively inflexible and require constant cleaning in this kind of environment. Employees not cooking or serving are cleaning, whilst robots not cooking are idle.
Employers who replace burger flippers on cost grounds are likely to be the same ones who attempt to cut corners on cleaning and in the process generate food poisoning outbreaks with subsequent compensation payments far exceeding the savings.
> a) ARM is RISC
The Cortex ranges are gathering decidedly unreduced instruction sets.
> b) x86 is CISC only in the instruction set. The processors themselves have had far more in common with RISC processors since the days of the Pentium Pro.
IIRC the original AMD K5 was a wrapped 29050 RISC processor with strapped on FPU (and it ran 50% faster than equivalent Intel CPUs for integer ops, which was what mattered most of the time)
The problem with having a massive instruction set is the increasing risk of errors in the conversion microcode, not all correctable.
Intel CPUs may be RISC at their core but in their quest to try and beat out memory latencies (speculative prereading, etc) they got sloppy and now we're all paying the price.
If DRAM memory latencies were down in single digit nanoseconds for random access we wouldn't be having this entire thread because the insanely long pipelines wouldn't be needed. It's all very well clocking your ram at 3000MHz and getting out 8 words at a time, but when you have to wait a few ten/hundred-thousand CPU clocks for what you asked for, whatever you're doing has to wait too.
Ram has increasingly been the bottleneck for the last decade. At this point we need (affordable) lower latency system ram, not faster SSDs. A large chunk of CPU optimisation and complexity since 2002 has been geared at getting around unshortenable latencies. You can only get so far ahead of yourself before the wheels fall off.
"That's the FIRST message sent, way before encryption is set up"
Looks like it's time to somehow wrap that handshake before moving onto the "I'd like to talk to XYZ site" and adopting that one's certificate.
I'm less worried about governments most of the time and more about companies - particularly advertisers.
Big Brother is watching YOU, so he can work out what to sell at you.
Amongst other things I've been a commercial driver and seen the way real people drive on real roads - including ones that shouldn't be attempted with the vehicles in question. One of the biggest problems with human drivers is inability to read the conditions and pressing on regardless.
Assuming you're in the USA, you live in a country with a surprisingly high road death rate - much higher than we would tolerate in most parts of western europe - and that's despite the highway speeds and following distances on most roads here.
The funny thing is that I've watched how self-driving cars have progressed over the last few years and how they're learning to drive roads never encountered before (Google was unusual at first in insisting that cars be explicitly taught the roads they drive on). In general they do better under adverse conditions than humans do, because they take fewer risks.
The consistent arrogance of the human driver is to assume (s)he is a much better driver than in reality, and that cars have much shorter stopping distances or cornering limits than they actually have. There was an old joke in the 1990s that most cars know the laws of physics far better than their drivers ever will. Drivers who _do_ have advanced training tend to assume that makes them "safer" so they go faster and take even more risks. The reality is that we're unstable monkeys prone to driving extremely emotionally and should never be allowed direct control of high speed moving machinery as we tend to push it well beyond our abilities to cope when something finally goes wrong. Most people who think they're "safe" at high speeds show classic "tunnel vision" perception problems on the highway and "target fixation" on an out-of-control vehicle is one of the most common causes of collisions which should have been avoided. In cities, we get so focussed on one or two hazards (eg, a cyclist wobbling along a narrow shopping street in front of us, with cars parking or opening doors) that we can completely miss someone stepping onto a pedestrian crossing at amuch closer distance - or even register that the crossing is there.
In my opinion, drivers who think they're much better than any robot (or most humans) are the ones least likely to actually be so, in a classic Dunning-Kruger setup - they don't know what they don't know, unless they happen to be the real 1-2% Mikko Haakenan or Nikki Lauda, etc - and you'll find that such drivers are _very_ safe, considerate drivers when in general traffic.
Insurance statistics will drive adoption of automation when the robots are ready and in the meantime you can expect more and more driver aids to become mandatory/non-disableable. Arguing with actuaries is pointless and when the US NHTSA points to a 40% reduction in statistical crash rates in Teslas thanks to the driver aids (and an even greater reduction in injuries as crash energies have been lower than expected - particularly for car vs pedestrian impacts), they take notice.
Yes, you may find that manual control is available under limited circumstances (speed limited, etc) or higher insurance rates applying, but just as aircraft have long been able to fly themselves from runway to runway and some have progressed to being able to taxi to/from the gate as well, cars will inexorably take the same path.
Eventually, unlimited human control will only be allowed on closed or private roads or specialist tracks. You can also expect that being allowed to take control comes with stringent testing requirements far in excess of european requirements today (Most american drivers _fail_ their first european driving tests, no matter how much experience they may have) and with regular retesting to keep the license.
In 50 years we are likely to be looking back on 20th/early 21st century cars, in the same way we look at 1920s vehicles now, shake our heads and say "They used to let humans control those things? No wonder they had sky high death and injury rates!"
It predates me. This is running VMS for support of ancient spacecraft software. We had a farm of DS10s and DS20s at one point. The only reason it survives is that keeping it is cheaper than moving to a VMS emulation environment.
I know the history of the Itanium. Sat, watched and waited for it. x86 is a mess and needed replacement even then.
(Hell, we would have bought more alphas if we could, but x86 won the war on both the bang-per-buck front and being the default for the original PC. This isn't so much VHS beating Beta as a souped up, revved out audio cassette format beating Beta.)
Was bitterly disappointed when it showed up with stupidly high pricing, high power consumption and relatively poor performance figures that precluded us buying any, quite apart from the inability to actually get any in Europe for quite a while.
In the meantime AMD released x86-64 CPUs which solved the 4GB barrier, then Intel bowed to pressure and crosslicensed them.
X86 Prices stayed low, relative performance kept climbing and Itanium effectively fell further and further behind, being repositioned from the idea of a general 64-bit server CPU to a high end one, then into niche spots like the Nonstops.
Itanium could have taken the market if Intel had been willing to sell it at a loss for a while. Yes there was resistance from the x86 desktop crowd but what ultimately sank it was the poor bang-per-buck it provided. Intel's marketing always seemed to lack conviction and once they crosslicensed x86-64, the writing was on the wall.
It's not as if it's the only Intel CPU that tanked over the years. The x86 is their moneymaker and what they've always come back to, despite its instruction set being a pile of fetid dingo kidneys. The sad truth is that they've never tried particularly hard to replace it because to do so would damage existing sales, even when they had better architectures to offer.
Itanic sank on the x86-64 iceberg.