Another common definition (we used to use this one in one group I worked in at Apple):
Alpha: Ready for testing by folks inside the company, but outside the development team
Beta: Ready for testing by a carefully-selected group of customers outside the company
Gamma: Ready for release to all customers
GM or Golden Master: The version actually released to customers (in most cases, this is the same as the Gamma version)
I thought that was a little weird, too. But the 80-core chip could simply have more wires (and therefore, fewer transistors). Given that they mention that there are routing elements between the cores, it's possible that a lot of the chip's real estate is taken up by massive busses between adjacent cores.
Another explanation might be that they didn't want to waste the time/expense to come up with an optimized layout, or that they intentionally spaced things out to make testing easier.
That's why they're in the special effects business. Making molded plastic look like 50-year-old weathered metal is what they do. I'm sure a Google search would help you find more info, but the basic gist of it is to combine multiple layers of paint, using techniques like dry-brushing, washing, and splattering.
"The VDG is safer than a Tesla coil, so for a newbie like me it seems like just the ring thing."
That's only the case because the VDG creates such a small current. If you start storing it, you're increasing the potential for a lethal shock. A square foot or so of capacitor can easily store enough charge to kill you, depending on the dielectric. At 30 KV or so, the discharges from my homemade HV capacitors sounded like gunshots - I got complaints from the neighbors.
As for your other idea, I'm not convinced that it'll work the way you think it will. You probably won't be able to move enough charge onto an object to make much of a magnetic field when it moves. The amount of electrons "flowing" in a DC current is very very high. Take a look at the definitions of the Ampere, and the Coulomb to get some idea of the quantities involved.
I worked at Apple at the time, and had figured out that a version of OS X for some new architecture was being readied for release about a year before the announcement was made. At the time, I had assumed that AMD-64 was the new architecture, but I turned out to be wrong about that. I think the reason they went with 32-bit x86 simply comes down to timing. The overall 64-bit support in the rest of the OS wasn't there yet, even for PPC. At the time, 64-bit PPC apps were limited to the BSD libraries - no Carbon, no Cocoa.
Once the decision was made to go with Intel as the processor supplier, the timing of the switch meant that 32-bit was the only model that could be supported out of the gate. Now, Apple has previously said that they're going to be improving 64-bit application support for future versions of OS X. I fully expect that Leopard, or whatever comes after, will have support for 64-bit applications using the full range of system services. A lot of hard work has gone into making the 32-bit to 64-bit transition as smooth as possible. Writing 64-bit console apps for PPC is basically a matter of changing a single compiler option, and viola - you can use dozens of gigabytes of memory just as easily as writing 32-bit code.
I expect that the support of x86-64 in OS X will be similar. For the developers that use it, it'll be a trivial change. The users won't even know which applications are 64-bit enabled.
Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's because there was another space-related story nearby, but when I saw "France Launches Anti-Spam Platform", the first image that came to mind was an orbital bombardment platform for eliminating spammers from orbit. Now that's the kind of technology taxpayer money should be spent on!
It certainly doesn't stop all copying, but the fact that the average consumer doesn't know, or care to know, how to circumvent DVD copy-protection means that it has the intended effect. The DMCA is an effective tool for preventing mass-sharing of pirated content.
Obviously from a technical perspective, a perfect DRM system isn't even possible. That's not the point. To be effective, the system just has to discourage wholesale copying of content by the average consumer. Dedicated pirates will always be able to circumvent the technical parts of the system.
You're right, I was trying to say two things in one sentence. In case anybody else was confused:
Back in the early 80's the Music industry started the transition from Vinyl to CD without having an effective DRM system in place. At the time, and for at least a few years after the transition, the amount of data on a CD was substantially more than the average computer's hard drive capacity, and very few people had even heard of lossy audio compression formats (MP3 not having been invented yet). Using a then state-of-the-art 14.4Kbps modem, it'd take on the order of 4 days to transfer 1 CD between two computers. Once you got the data transferred, you'd be listening to it on a fairly low-quality sound card on your PC - and in fact, since you'd be limited on the playback side anyway, you might encode it as 8-bit mono samples, cutting the transfer time to "only" a single day.
The CD format was in nearly all ways noticeably superior to the existing analog formats - more durable, better sound, random access, etc, etc. Zillions of CD players were sold as a result, and the CD quickly became the dominant music distribution format. For many years, CD duplication equipment was relatively rare, and quite expensive.
By the mid-to-late 1990s, when MP3 encoder software and fast internet connections started to become more common at around the same time, there was an explosion of music piracy on a previously-unknown scale. There's a lot of debate on actual numbers, and what percentage of those downloads represented lost sales, but the sheer amount of copying going on these days is something that simply wasn't (couldn't have been) foreseen back in the days of dubbing at real-time or 2x speed between dual tape decks.
Unfortunately for the folks in the music industry, there's no obvious way to dig themselves out of the hole they've made. The CD format is "good enough" for the vast majority of consumers, so there's little they can do to entice people onto a new format. And forcing consumers onto a new format simply isn't going to work. Despite that SACD and DVD-Audio have higher sound quality and better features (and incidentally, DRM), consumers just aren't interested.
The DRM schemes that have been tried for CD-Audio content have been either trivially circumvented, or too annoying for users to put up with. I don't think anybody seriously thinks they can put the genie back in the bottle now. All of the DRM stuff for downloadable music is just an attempt to keep the situation from getting worse until they figure out what the "real" plan is.
The reason we have DRM is that the media companies don't think that their interests are aligned with those of the consumer. The hell of it is that most of the time, there's no conflict. If HBO makes DRM-free video available on-demand, most of their existing customers would use it just about how you'd expect. They'd occasionally pay whatever nominal fee, and watch that episode of the Sopranos that they missed last week, and everybody will be happy. HBO gets another revenue stream, and the customers get improved ease-of-use.
On the other hand, you know that *somebody* will set up their PC with a cablecard (or whatever) and just start downloading everything they can get and then uploading it to the internet where non-subscribers can get it for free.
HBO is understandably worried that if their most popular content is available for free, some customers will stop paying for it. Based on prior experience with people "pirating" cable, I can't say that they're wrong. People used to regularly break into our cable company's distribution boxes and strip off the notch filters back in the days of analog cable, and there's a brisk business out there on the internet for devices to help people to cheat cable & satellite TV channel restrictions.
I'd like to believe that DRM-free media will eventually win out, because it's so much more convenient for everybody involved, from the producers, to the consumer electronics industry, to the end-user. Unfortunately, there's some anecdotal evidence from the recent experiences of the music industry that the existence of DRM-free digital coipies of content just leads to rampant copying, and that does have some negative effect on sales. The music industry went digital without an effective DRM system in place, and now they're stuck with it - you can't stop making CDs, or nobody would buy your music.
That's a "mistake" video companies are eager not to repeat.
There are ways to encourage voter participation without breaking anonymity.
In Australia, all citizens who are eligible to vote must attend a polling place on election day. Anyone who doesn't vote is fined (unless they have a sufficient reason, like illness or injury). Apparently several other countries do the same. Ref: http://www.australianpolitics.com/voting/systems/c ompulsory.shtml
It's the waste. If you're squeamish about getting poo on you, you probably don't want to go into plumbing. Same rationale applies to a fear of spiders, insects, or drowned rodents...
It's been quite a while since I worked on any significant industrial robotics projects (10 years?), but a large number of the robots I was familiar with in the 90's didn't have much of anything in the way of "self-preservation" sensors. It was (and probably still is) easy to program them to smash themselves to bits, even accidentally. The problem isn't quite as simple as you might think.
In the specific example you gave, a clutch and/or a thermal cutoff on the motors would probably keep them from burning up, but if you programmed that same robot to pick up the heaviest object it could lift and drop it on its control cabinet, it'd happily do so. Similarly, having an arm that's carrying a lot of weight whirl around at the highest possible speed then suddenly stopping it could easily bend something.
You can read about my last experience with a semi-suicidal robot on my blog. I thought it was pretty funny, after I figured out I hadn't broken anything.
Their argument seems to be that the 10 Billion Euros could be better spent building wind-power plants to supply clean energy today, rather than funding a massive research project that has little chance of leading to any kind of useful power-generation technology.
The project, estimated to cost 10bn euros, will not generate any electricity, instead it will need massive amounts of energy to heat up.
"With 10 billion, we could build 10,000MW offshore windfarms, delivering electricity for 7.5 million European households," said Jan Vande Putte of Greenpeace International.
I don't understand their comment about fusion reactors producing large amounts of waste, and emitting large amounts of radioactive materials.
Certainly, any kind of fusion powerplant is going to generate some nuclear waste - spare neutrons from the fusion reactions will likely "activate" the reactor vessel and surrounding structures. That's still an enormous improvement over fission reactors - I've been lead to believe that most of the waste generated by fusion reactors would be "low-level" waste.
A properly-operating reactor isn't going to emit any significant radioactive material into the environment. Maybe they're thinking about accidental Deuterium and He3 releases, which don't represent any kind of threat to the environment.
The proliferation argument is more persuasive. The Tritium that would need to be bred for a self-sustaining fusion reactor is also a critical ingredient in many types of nuclear weapons. A fusion reactor could be used to breed other radioactive elements as well, possibly including Pu.
There is some amount of HDTV content available from unencrypted broadcasts, but that's not directly relevant to my original point, I think.
While you can record over-the-air HDTV signals legally and fairly easily (at least for now), you can't buy that content in a store without having copy protection applied to it.
One compelling argument for making music downloads DRM-free is that most music sold in stores is recorded on DRM-free CDs anyway. On the movie/TV side of the aisle, it's all copy-protected DVDs, so the same argument doesn't apply.
It might be possible to convince the MPAA to sell non-protected content, but the vast majority of what they currently sell is protected, so they'd be understandably sceptical of giving that up.
You can get more than Apple I level performance for substantially less than $1.00 these days. I don't know what the cheapest 8-bit microprocessor is going for these days, but you can buy flash-based microcontrollers with substantially more power than a 6502 for less than $0.50 each these days.
It seems like the ultimate limiting factor is in packaging and testing - you'll be spending a certain amount for a fully-tested chip in a plastic package, no matter what the actual chip is. That price will have more to do with the number of pins on the package than the number of transistors on the chip.
In really cost-sensitive applications, they already do away with the packaging, and just glue the chip directly to the PCB. Nearly every electronic doo-dad you see on the drugstore shelf is built this way.
Much of the law is based on precedent, which means that prior decisions in similar court cases influence or completely decide the outcome of current cases. The biggest problem with this kind of corporate behavior is that it sets a precedent. Microsoft can now demonstrate based on these two *HUGE* deals, that these companies acknowledge that Linux infringes on Microsoft's patents.
Fortunately, that's not how it works. Only prior court decisions form a precedent, and then only if the prior cases have significant overlap of facts with the case in question. The fact that two (or two hundred) other companies have previously signed a contract that implies something about the legal status of Linux isn't going to have any effect on a judge's decision in some future case.
On the other hand, the fact of these previous deals will have an impact on the decision-making process of executives at other companies that are presented with a similar proposal. So, in the sense that "precedent" is used in everyday speech, this does set a bad precedent. But in the restricted legal sense of the word, it doesn't.
As for whether Linux infringes on Microsoft's patents, I'd be willing to bet that it does. It probably also infringes on patents owned by Sun, Intel, HP, Apple, and any number of other companies. One of the truly ridiculous things about the growth in software patents is that it's now nearly impossible to write any useful software that doesn't infringe on somebody's patent.
It's obviously early times for PS3 games. The games I've played (Resistance, Motorstorm, Virtua Fighter) really just seem to be "more of the same", but with higher-resolution graphics. I think when/if developers start to really take advantage of the Cell, you'll see some leading-edge physics and gameplay to go with those graphics, but right now, it's just not that interesting to me.
Then again, I did buy a Wii, primarily due to Nintendo's (and others') focus on "wacky" but fun games. The Wii is shaping up to be the only video game system that will actually increase social interaction at events when it's brought out. Oh, and the Wii Remote, of course. Games like Elebits and Rayman Raving Rabbid could be done on any other console, and in Rayman's case, already has been. But they're just not going to be the same without the Wii Remote interaction.
Marble Madness was a (near perfect) port of the arcade game, so not really an "Amiga" game, per-se. And I don't think it was really all that influential, either. There are a few maze games out there these days, but it's a pretty anemic genre.
Rather than microcode updates, the idea is to have a pattern-recognizer engine that looks for situations which would trigger known errata, and then trigger a recovery procedure to avoid the bug. One example they give in the paper is:
If the L1 suffers a miss while the power manager is on and the processor is flushing its L2, some L2 lines may get corrupted. [Signal condition: L1WAITMISS & DPM (dynamic power management) & L2FLUSH].
To work around this, you detect the simultaneous L2 flush and L1 miss, and temporarily disable power management. On the next instruction, you put it back the way it was. They also mention that since so many of these defects require such precise timing, just flushing the processor pipeline and restarting the current instruction will work around most of the defects they looked at.
For a majority of the defects they analyzed for the paper, they figure that flushing the pipeline and restarting the problematic instruction will work around the problem. Of course, you'd want to have a more-sophisticated version for the more complex cases, but even the naive implementation would drastically reduce the chances of hitting these design defects.
Look, find one of the links to the original research paper elsewhere in the discussion, and read it. The idea is to add a small amount of reconfigurable logic to a complex microprocessor, and use that programmable logic to implement a system for working around design defects in the processor.
The point is that Intel and AMD are already selling processors with, in some cases, dozens of serious design flaws. This technology would allow them to patch already-installed chips to make them work correctly, rather than just fixing the problem in the next revision of the silicon, and leaving their previous customers with defective hardware, which is how design defects in microprocessors are "handled" now.
It's for fixing design defects after the design is frozen. Similar in concept to the microcode patches that Intel and AMD use for patching certain problems with their processors, but much more versatile, and specifically targeted at the most common types of design defects, according to the original paper: http://iacoma.cs.uiuc.edu/iacoma-papers/micro06_ph oenix.pdf
Slashdot Mirror
Another common definition (we used to use this one in one group I worked in at Apple):
Alpha: Ready for testing by folks inside the company, but outside the development team
Beta: Ready for testing by a carefully-selected group of customers outside the company
Gamma: Ready for release to all customers
GM or Golden Master: The version actually released to customers (in most cases, this is the same as the Gamma version)
I thought that was a little weird, too. But the 80-core chip could simply have more wires (and therefore, fewer transistors). Given that they mention that there are routing elements between the cores, it's possible that a lot of the chip's real estate is taken up by massive busses between adjacent cores.
Another explanation might be that they didn't want to waste the time/expense to come up with an optimized layout, or that they intentionally spaced things out to make testing easier.
That's why they're in the special effects business. Making molded plastic look like 50-year-old weathered metal is what they do. I'm sure a Google search would help you find more info, but the basic gist of it is to combine multiple layers of paint, using techniques like dry-brushing, washing, and splattering.
"The VDG is safer than a Tesla coil, so for a newbie like me it seems like just the ring thing."
That's only the case because the VDG creates such a small current. If you start storing it, you're increasing the potential for a lethal shock. A square foot or so of capacitor can easily store enough charge to kill you, depending on the dielectric. At 30 KV or so, the discharges from my homemade HV capacitors sounded like gunshots - I got complaints from the neighbors.
As for your other idea, I'm not convinced that it'll work the way you think it will. You probably won't be able to move enough charge onto an object to make much of a magnetic field when it moves. The amount of electrons "flowing" in a DC current is very very high. Take a look at the definitions of the Ampere, and the Coulomb to get some idea of the quantities involved.
I worked at Apple at the time, and had figured out that a version of OS X for some new architecture was being readied for release about a year before the announcement was made. At the time, I had assumed that AMD-64 was the new architecture, but I turned out to be wrong about that. I think the reason they went with 32-bit x86 simply comes down to timing. The overall 64-bit support in the rest of the OS wasn't there yet, even for PPC. At the time, 64-bit PPC apps were limited to the BSD libraries - no Carbon, no Cocoa.
Once the decision was made to go with Intel as the processor supplier, the timing of the switch meant that 32-bit was the only model that could be supported out of the gate. Now, Apple has previously said that they're going to be improving 64-bit application support for future versions of OS X. I fully expect that Leopard, or whatever comes after, will have support for 64-bit applications using the full range of system services. A lot of hard work has gone into making the 32-bit to 64-bit transition as smooth as possible. Writing 64-bit console apps for PPC is basically a matter of changing a single compiler option, and viola - you can use dozens of gigabytes of memory just as easily as writing 32-bit code.
I expect that the support of x86-64 in OS X will be similar. For the developers that use it, it'll be a trivial change. The users won't even know which applications are 64-bit enabled.
Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's because there was another space-related story nearby, but when I saw "France Launches Anti-Spam Platform", the first image that came to mind was an orbital bombardment platform for eliminating spammers from orbit. Now that's the kind of technology taxpayer money should be spent on!
It certainly doesn't stop all copying, but the fact that the average consumer doesn't know, or care to know, how to circumvent DVD copy-protection means that it has the intended effect. The DMCA is an effective tool for preventing mass-sharing of pirated content.
Obviously from a technical perspective, a perfect DRM system isn't even possible. That's not the point. To be effective, the system just has to discourage wholesale copying of content by the average consumer. Dedicated pirates will always be able to circumvent the technical parts of the system.
You're right, I was trying to say two things in one sentence. In case anybody else was confused:
Back in the early 80's the Music industry started the transition from Vinyl to CD without having an effective DRM system in place. At the time, and for at least a few years after the transition, the amount of data on a CD was substantially more than the average computer's hard drive capacity, and very few people had even heard of lossy audio compression formats (MP3 not having been invented yet). Using a then state-of-the-art 14.4Kbps modem, it'd take on the order of 4 days to transfer 1 CD between two computers. Once you got the data transferred, you'd be listening to it on a fairly low-quality sound card on your PC - and in fact, since you'd be limited on the playback side anyway, you might encode it as 8-bit mono samples, cutting the transfer time to "only" a single day.
The CD format was in nearly all ways noticeably superior to the existing analog formats - more durable, better sound, random access, etc, etc. Zillions of CD players were sold as a result, and the CD quickly became the dominant music distribution format. For many years, CD duplication equipment was relatively rare, and quite expensive.
By the mid-to-late 1990s, when MP3 encoder software and fast internet connections started to become more common at around the same time, there was an explosion of music piracy on a previously-unknown scale. There's a lot of debate on actual numbers, and what percentage of those downloads represented lost sales, but the sheer amount of copying going on these days is something that simply wasn't (couldn't have been) foreseen back in the days of dubbing at real-time or 2x speed between dual tape decks.
Unfortunately for the folks in the music industry, there's no obvious way to dig themselves out of the hole they've made. The CD format is "good enough" for the vast majority of consumers, so there's little they can do to entice people onto a new format. And forcing consumers onto a new format simply isn't going to work. Despite that SACD and DVD-Audio have higher sound quality and better features (and incidentally, DRM), consumers just aren't interested.
The DRM schemes that have been tried for CD-Audio content have been either trivially circumvented, or too annoying for users to put up with. I don't think anybody seriously thinks they can put the genie back in the bottle now. All of the DRM stuff for downloadable music is just an attempt to keep the situation from getting worse until they figure out what the "real" plan is.
The reason we have DRM is that the media companies don't think that their interests are aligned with those of the consumer. The hell of it is that most of the time, there's no conflict. If HBO makes DRM-free video available on-demand, most of their existing customers would use it just about how you'd expect. They'd occasionally pay whatever nominal fee, and watch that episode of the Sopranos that they missed last week, and everybody will be happy. HBO gets another revenue stream, and the customers get improved ease-of-use.
On the other hand, you know that *somebody* will set up their PC with a cablecard (or whatever) and just start downloading everything they can get and then uploading it to the internet where non-subscribers can get it for free.
HBO is understandably worried that if their most popular content is available for free, some customers will stop paying for it. Based on prior experience with people "pirating" cable, I can't say that they're wrong. People used to regularly break into our cable company's distribution boxes and strip off the notch filters back in the days of analog cable, and there's a brisk business out there on the internet for devices to help people to cheat cable & satellite TV channel restrictions.
I'd like to believe that DRM-free media will eventually win out, because it's so much more convenient for everybody involved, from the producers, to the consumer electronics industry, to the end-user. Unfortunately, there's some anecdotal evidence from the recent experiences of the music industry that the existence of DRM-free digital coipies of content just leads to rampant copying, and that does have some negative effect on sales. The music industry went digital without an effective DRM system in place, and now they're stuck with it - you can't stop making CDs, or nobody would buy your music.
That's a "mistake" video companies are eager not to repeat.
There are ways to encourage voter participation without breaking anonymity.
c ompulsory.shtml
a /compulsoryvote.htm
In Australia, all citizens who are eligible to vote must attend a polling place on election day. Anyone who doesn't vote is fined (unless they have a sufficient reason, like illness or injury). Apparently several other countries do the same.
Ref: http://www.australianpolitics.com/voting/systems/
This web page:
http://geography.about.com/od/politicalgeography/
has a discussion of some of the pros and cons of such a system.
It's the waste. If you're squeamish about getting poo on you, you probably don't want to go into plumbing. Same rationale applies to a fear of spiders, insects, or drowned rodents...
It's been quite a while since I worked on any significant industrial robotics projects (10 years?), but a large number of the robots I was familiar with in the 90's didn't have much of anything in the way of "self-preservation" sensors. It was (and probably still is) easy to program them to smash themselves to bits, even accidentally. The problem isn't quite as simple as you might think.
In the specific example you gave, a clutch and/or a thermal cutoff on the motors would probably keep them from burning up, but if you programmed that same robot to pick up the heaviest object it could lift and drop it on its control cabinet, it'd happily do so. Similarly, having an arm that's carrying a lot of weight whirl around at the highest possible speed then suddenly stopping it could easily bend something.
You can read about my last experience with a semi-suicidal robot on my blog. I thought it was pretty funny, after I figured out I hadn't broken anything.
I don't understand their comment about fusion reactors producing large amounts of waste, and emitting large amounts of radioactive materials.
Certainly, any kind of fusion powerplant is going to generate some nuclear waste - spare neutrons from the fusion reactions will likely "activate" the reactor vessel and surrounding structures. That's still an enormous improvement over fission reactors - I've been lead to believe that most of the waste generated by fusion reactors would be "low-level" waste.
A properly-operating reactor isn't going to emit any significant radioactive material into the environment. Maybe they're thinking about accidental Deuterium and He3 releases, which don't represent any kind of threat to the environment.
The proliferation argument is more persuasive. The Tritium that would need to be bred for a self-sustaining fusion reactor is also a critical ingredient in many types of nuclear weapons. A fusion reactor could be used to breed other radioactive elements as well, possibly including Pu.
There is some amount of HDTV content available from unencrypted broadcasts, but that's not directly relevant to my original point, I think.
While you can record over-the-air HDTV signals legally and fairly easily (at least for now), you can't buy that content in a store without having copy protection applied to it.
One compelling argument for making music downloads DRM-free is that most music sold in stores is recorded on DRM-free CDs anyway. On the movie/TV side of the aisle, it's all copy-protected DVDs, so the same argument doesn't apply.
It might be possible to convince the MPAA to sell non-protected content, but the vast majority of what they currently sell is protected, so they'd be understandably sceptical of giving that up.
You can get more than Apple I level performance for substantially less than $1.00 these days. I don't know what the cheapest 8-bit microprocessor is going for these days, but you can buy flash-based microcontrollers with substantially more power than a 6502 for less than $0.50 each these days.
It seems like the ultimate limiting factor is in packaging and testing - you'll be spending a certain amount for a fully-tested chip in a plastic package, no matter what the actual chip is. That price will have more to do with the number of pins on the package than the number of transistors on the chip.
In really cost-sensitive applications, they already do away with the packaging, and just glue the chip directly to the PCB. Nearly every electronic doo-dad you see on the drugstore shelf is built this way.
Fortunately, that's not how it works. Only prior court decisions form a precedent, and then only if the prior cases have significant overlap of facts with the case in question. The fact that two (or two hundred) other companies have previously signed a contract that implies something about the legal status of Linux isn't going to have any effect on a judge's decision in some future case.
On the other hand, the fact of these previous deals will have an impact on the decision-making process of executives at other companies that are presented with a similar proposal. So, in the sense that "precedent" is used in everyday speech, this does set a bad precedent. But in the restricted legal sense of the word, it doesn't.
As for whether Linux infringes on Microsoft's patents, I'd be willing to bet that it does. It probably also infringes on patents owned by Sun, Intel, HP, Apple, and any number of other companies. One of the truly ridiculous things about the growth in software patents is that it's now nearly impossible to write any useful software that doesn't infringe on somebody's patent.
It's obviously early times for PS3 games. The games I've played (Resistance, Motorstorm, Virtua Fighter) really just seem to be "more of the same", but with higher-resolution graphics. I think when/if developers start to really take advantage of the Cell, you'll see some leading-edge physics and gameplay to go with those graphics, but right now, it's just not that interesting to me.
Then again, I did buy a Wii, primarily due to Nintendo's (and others') focus on "wacky" but fun games. The Wii is shaping up to be the only video game system that will actually increase social interaction at events when it's brought out. Oh, and the Wii Remote, of course. Games like Elebits and Rayman Raving Rabbid could be done on any other console, and in Rayman's case, already has been. But they're just not going to be the same without the Wii Remote interaction.
"should have" -> "should've" -> "should of"
It drives me batty as well. It's almost as bad as "I could care less".
Marble Madness was a (near perfect) port of the arcade game, so not really an "Amiga" game, per-se. And I don't think it was really all that influential, either. There are a few maze games out there these days, but it's a pretty anemic genre.
To work around this, you detect the simultaneous L2 flush and L1 miss, and temporarily disable power management. On the next instruction, you put it back the way it was. They also mention that since so many of these defects require such precise timing, just flushing the processor pipeline and restarting the current instruction will work around most of the defects they looked at.
For a majority of the defects they analyzed for the paper, they figure that flushing the pipeline and restarting the problematic instruction will work around the problem. Of course, you'd want to have a more-sophisticated version for the more complex cases, but even the naive implementation would drastically reduce the chances of hitting these design defects.
Look, find one of the links to the original research paper elsewhere in the discussion, and read it. The idea is to add a small amount of reconfigurable logic to a complex microprocessor, and use that programmable logic to implement a system for working around design defects in the processor.
The point is that Intel and AMD are already selling processors with, in some cases, dozens of serious design flaws. This technology would allow them to patch already-installed chips to make them work correctly, rather than just fixing the problem in the next revision of the silicon, and leaving their previous customers with defective hardware, which is how design defects in microprocessors are "handled" now.
It's for fixing design defects after the design is frozen. Similar in concept to the microcode patches that Intel and AMD use for patching certain problems with their processors, but much more versatile, and specifically targeted at the most common types of design defects, according to the original paper:h oenix.pdf
http://iacoma.cs.uiuc.edu/iacoma-papers/micro06_p