No it really isn't MS's problem. Basically hardware vendors are responsible for driver support. They are welcome to support whatever OSes they like. Many vendors discontinue support for old OSes with new hardware. Since people with old OSes don't tend to get new hardware, they find it not worth their while to spend time working on it.
Same deal with software. For example Cakewalk has discontinued XP support with Sonar X2. Since it is nearing EOL, they don't feel it worth their while to test their new software on an old OS.
If you want a company that updates their OS forever, well good luck with that unless you are willing to pay a hefty service contract. Even then you will probably discover the updates will be little more than bug fixes, and if you want support for new hardware they'll require you to update to a new version.
Seriously trying to whine about MS requiring people to occasionally upgrade their OS is rather stupid. They support their OSes for quite a long time, 10 years is the standard support but some are extended (like XP). That is pretty damn good, rare you find other OSes with support that long.
So XP is now coming to an end of that support. You can upgrade to 7 or 8, which have guaranteed support until 2020 or 2023 respectively.
Oh, and Windows 8 works just fine on older hardware, as does Windows 7 (yes we've tested it at work).
For one, licensing agreements are something that once done are done. They are not written with a "But we can take it back if we want," clause. So Intel has the rights to x64 once and for all time. What's more, it comes from older cross licensing with x86 that AMD has. More or less the situation is that both companies have to share with each other, by contract. Intel can't keep AMD from using x86, including new features (which is why they tried for IA64) but the reverse is AMD can't keep Intel from using x86 stuff they develop.
Now if you are talking about back in the day, well had AMD been able to keep Intel form using x64 (they couldn't but let's just say) then all that likely would have happened is x64 would have died off. Its success is because it is easily compatible with old programs and because new CPUs from both the firms worked with it. If Intel CPUs couldn't support it, there would have been much less interest.
They had a faster processor, but that is only one part of the equation. They had two major problems:
1) They didn't offer a CPU/chipset/mobo solution. Intel does it all for customers, they make the entire core if you want. This is useful to OEMs because there's no finger pointing when there's problems. Doesn't matter which of those components is broken, same company is responsible, they need to find and implement the fix. With the Athlons you could have a 3 way pointing match between AMD, VIA, and whoever made the board all claiming the other guy was responsible for a problem.
2) No good chipset. The processor was all kinds of fast but woe betide you if you wanted to use it with, say a GeForce DDR. The VIA chipset that was the "premier" solution for it implemented the AGP spec improperly and wouldn't work with the GeForce card since the AGP slot wasn't really AGP, basically just a fast PCI slot. This wasn't the only problem, just one of the most major ones.
So it is no surprise that some OEMs shied away from them. I built an Athlon system and it was a couple weeks of hell trying to make it work before I found out that no, there was just no way my GeForce would work with it. Back the parts went and in came Intel parts that functioned without error.
Likewise at work we did have some Athlon systems, Gateway I believe, and they were far more trouble than the Intel systems as a whole.
Intel isn't just popular because of the power, but their stability. It matters in business. AMD never really had a competitive solution in that regard.
I'm not saying Intel didn't also try to squash AMD (IA64 was another attempt, since there is no cross licensing for that instruction set) but AMD did little to help themselves. They produced a good processor without the hardware to support it.
Then they caught another break, with the fuckup that was the P4, but they rested on their laurels and didn't really do much in the way of architecture updates. Intel hit back with the Core 2, then Core i, then Sandy Bridge all of which are stellar performers per clock and there was just nothing new from AMD, until now Bulldozer which is pathetic, worse than their old chips at times.
Intel is not blameless, but AMD has done themselves few favours.
Also even when Intel announces something, they don't release it until the supply chain is full. When the Ivy Bridge launched, you could get it from every OEM, every online retailers, and in quantity. There was none of this "Just a few parts that sell out quickly." You could buy more or less as much Ivy Bridge as you wanted, from whomever you wanted.
Not saying that is the only way to do things, but I can respect that. Intel's launches are very hard launches. They have made sure there are plenty of parts ready to go so that people can buy them. GPU vendors often do very soft launches, where only a few parts are out there and they are perpetually out of stock as new units are produced, until finally the chain gets saturated.
The Ivy Bridge processors are not a good example
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Is Qualcomm the New AMD?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The pricing is, but not the CPUs. The problem is there is a finite amount of 22nm capacity. Right now Intel has only one 22nm fab online. They are in the process of converting their fab in Israel to 22nm, but right now the one in Chandler is it.
That being the case, there is only so much they can choose to produce on that process, and what they are choosing to do is mainstream desktop and laptop processors. They've changed their strategy from using the newest process to the highest end parts first to using it for more mainstream parts, and then moving it in to high end.
You also can't just say "Well build more capacity!" as not only are they doing that, but it takes a long time (you don't order this stuff online and install it in a day) and costs a ton of money.
I fully agree that Intel reams people on prices because they can. I mean their low end i5 is as good as AMD's top end Bulldozer for most things. However supply issues are something else. They have to choose what chips to produce in their fabs, and only certain fabs are at certain levels.
You also can't hate on Intel for their fab investment. They pump more money in to fab technology than anyone else (hence are nearly always a node ahead) and they build most of them in the US. They are really big on R&D and it pays off.
This idea that we could build a magical "exploit proof" OS if only we want to bad enough is stupid. While some exploits happen because of stupid design decisions, far more happen because of simple unintended consequences.
With an OS you are in the difficult position of needing to offer access but trying to keep out unauthorized access, and to do so in an ecosystem of arbitrary software on the system. That's a real hard problem to solve. Any time you build a door, it can be used for both wanted and unwanted visitors to enter through.
So sure, you can completely secure something by completely securing it from being accessed, but then it isn't useful. If you want to have an OS that connects to the Internet, which is totally wild and untamed, and you want to be able to have end users install arbitrary software, and you want to let it be used in arbitrary ways, well it'll be open to exploits. Design as carefully as you like, something unintended will pop up at some point.
The more you lock it down, the more secure it'll be, but the less useful.
There's no magic bullet, were there, it would already be in use. It is all tradeoffs. That's why some systems that need to be really secure are in a situation where they can only run verified code, and they are not on public networks and can only be accessed in specified ways and so on. Even that isn't perfect, just better.
People need to understand that digital security really is like physical security: There is NO perfect security. There in only defense in depth, practice monitoring and mitigation, and eternal vigilance.
You see that all the time with BTC types. They love the idea of deflation because in their minds, it means that their money gets worth more over time and that is a good thing. They fail to consider the larger economic implications of it, thinking in the narrow sense of their savings accounts only.
A friend who was a coastie told a story about a sub messing with them:
The guy watching the radar grabbed the first officer because he was confused. He was seeing an occasional weak reading from behind them, a real small return like a little boat or something, fairly close, but when he'd look there was nothing out there. It was daytime, plenty of visibility, all that. It was inconsistent, not always there. Nothing seemed to be wrong with the radar. The XO saw this too, so they grabbed my friend and had him continually monitor aft to see what was going on.
The answer? A sub goofing around. It would raise up part of its sail, wait until it got hit with the radar (they have ESM antennas) and then dive. When it came back up again, my friend flashed Morse at it with a light and the sub then surfaced and came over to say hi.
It wasn't an exercise or anything, just a sub screwing around. Was it against Navy regs? I dunno, probably, but the sub was doing it anyways and it wasn't like anyone got in trouble. Everyone had a laugh and the sub went on its way.
There has been far, far too many delays and political fuckery with this. I'm glad to hear it is finally going online.
Satellite navigation is just very important to everything these days (it is the primary nav method for all planes, ships, etc). Having everything rely on GPS, and thus on the budget the US chooses to spend keeping it working, is not a good idea.
This will make things much more reliable since, after an initial hissing match, the US and EU settled down and the systems play nice together and you'll be able to get devices that use both for better accuracy and reliability.
Ultimately all it will do is lead to nVidia not supporting Optimus on Linux. People need to remember that their "give a shit" index for Linux is way less than Windows to begin with. Then understand that most of their market in Linux is high end stuff like visualization workstations, CUDA compute systems, and so on. Linux laptops are not a big thing. It just is not a large enough market for them to care all that much.
So what that means is that they might well support it, if they can do so with a reasonably small amount of resources. However if it ends up being a real problem, they'll probably just write it off and not bother.
The ideological crap with regards to the GPL pisses me off. I think it is wonderful that LInux itself is GPL, however they shouldn't be hostile to non-GPL software. To me it would be as stupid as Windows refusing to allow an open source driver or program to run. There is no reason Linux shouldn't have a good setup to work with binary only drivers.
Developers need to understand that to most people, computers are tools and they are pragmatic about it. They want the tool that does the job well. So if you go and let ideology get in the way of usability, they'll just ignore you and look elsewhere.
They have many licensed components in their code. So they have to remove all that and rework it, and do it in such a fashion as to not get sued by those companies (who might claim that the nVidia programmers couldn't work on the new code since they'd seen the licensed code). This isn't just some more minor features such as S3 texture compression, but OpenGL itself. Go look it up, OpenGL isn't a free "do whatever you like" setup. There is licensing for it for companies like nVidia.
Even worse is that because the issue isn't just opening the source, but actually GPLing it, that makes it so much harder. Some of their licensed components are things the companies might be ok with source distribution. However nVidia doesn't have the right to relicense that code under the GPL. So even if they opened it, it wouldn't do any good as the GPL is what is required here.
So the argument of "just open the driver" is somewhat unrealistic. It isn't just that nVidia likes to have a competitive edge, though they surely do, but that it would be a major issue and a lot more work to try and do so, if it were even possible.
Again, take the OpenGL issue since it is a pretty fundamental one. nVidia licenses the code and has the latest OpenGL 4.3 implemented on cards that support it. Ok so let's say they decide to grab the Mesa code for an OSS branch. It's MIT license which is GPL compatible so good to go right? Well, not really. Mesa is OpenGL 3.1, 3 years out of date, and it only recently got that. So they can either deal without a bunch of features on all platforms, have two different drivers one full featured on Windows and such, one with less features, or they can invest a ton of work to try and make their own up to date OSS OpenGL implementation and hope they aren't sued.
None of those sound like very good uses of resources.
And who is going to host that for them? The problem is that they don't have the money to set something like that up, and without it set up, it isn't low latency. You seem to have this idea like this is some inevitable path, it really isn't. It is the kind of thing for which there is a very limited time people would even be interested.
As technology keeps improving you get better graphics/gameplay out of lesser systems. When cheap devices have powerful chips there is just much less reason to try and process shit remotely.
Hosting data remotely makes sense, when feasible, and I can full and well see the day when you'll basically download games (and other apps) on demand. However processing it all remotely and streaming the video doesn't unless you can get better quality for less money doing so. Well, as chips get cheaper and more powerful, that is harder and harder to do.
A system like Steam extended to a more "on demand" sort of thing (where assets are streamed as needed) makes sense and I'm sure we'll see. A system where you run games on a server farm, rather than the devices you have does not make sense.
1) Latency is still a problem. This idea that they'd ever be in local data centers all over the world is just stupid. That is expensive and difficult to do. The whole appeal of "cloud" type of stuff is you don't have to give a shit where you host. You pay someone like Amazon who has massive data centers in a couple locations to deal with your shit. So they'll always have interface latency problems.
2) In 10 years, it'll be an even harder sell over cheap hardware. What low end hardware can do keeps going up and up. 10 years ago integrated graphics were so bad they sucked for Windows itself, never mind games, and phones were monochrome character based deals. Now games officially support Integrated graphics as they are good enough and our phones run the Unreal Engine 3. Give that 10 more years and cheap hardware is going to be awful hard to compete with.
So when you are talking latency for something like interactive video, you have to take in to account the amount of time it takes to transfer a frame on top of the round trip packet time. So this means to keep latency down you need to set your stream to less than the bandwidth you are going to require, significantly less.
Onlive used a 1mbps stream. That is not at all enough to do quality 720p video, never mind when you are trying to do it at 60fps as they were. Just not enough bits for all the data you want. So you are going to get artifacting and all that jazz. Of course this is on top of the inherent quality loss that video compression these days does like chroma subsampling and so on.
There's just no way to make it work well, unless everyone has much faster connections, and even then there'll still be interface lag from the latency.
That aside there's the problem that never mind consoles, it is cheap to upgrade your computer. If you've a reasonably modern computer for about $100 you can drop in a pretty good discrete GPU and all of a sudden the thing is good at playing games. That is the only thing most new systems lack, CPUs are all kinds of powerful, it is hard to get something without 4GB of RAM, they just don't have dedicated GPUs.
For that matter, the integrated Intel GPUs are getting pretty good. Games are officially supporting the Intel HD 3000 and 4000 series GPUs. No, you can't crank things up but they run surprisingly well. I've messed with it on my laptop which has switchable graphics.
As such their only market is people with really old computers that can't be upgraded, or low end un-upgradable computers like netbooks. Neither are groups that are likely to drop a lot of coin on gaming. Oh, and of course they have to have good internet to use it.
It just isn't a sensible business model. To the extent we ever have "cloud gaming" it will be a case of hardware that renders locally and just downloads the binaries/assets in an on demand fashion from a data center. It solves all the interface lag, compression, etc problems and really hardware is cheap and getting cheaper.
There are more of them now than when they were the only computers there were. Now that still isn't many compared to desktops, but the market is as big as it has ever been. They have been eclipsed by other devices, but not killed off and show no signs of dying.
I have a friend who doesn't work for a company that does bonuses like that, but still is a "moar hours = moar better" kind of place. My friend is a nice guy but... not as competent as one might hope. Back when we both worked at the same place another co-worker described him as someone who "Broke down big rocks in to little rocks and then glued the rocks back together." Basically he has a lot of enthusiasm, but ends up spending a lot of time fixing problems he created by not having a good understanding what he was doing and being careful.
Well he keeps trying to convince me to come work for his new company. He is so happy because he makes a lot more money. They also think he's one of their best employees. That right there tells me all I need to know, and that I'd hate it. He's the kind of guy who will work 10-12 hour days 6-7 days a week. However much of that time is spent fixing problems he created. He replaces finesse with brute force. He does get things done, but no faster than someone "works smarter" to steal a management cliche and often slower.
The reason they think he's great is because he's always at work. He's a "hard worker". They value face time, not results. That is all kinds of not my place. I want a place, and work at a place, that is happy if you can solve a problem quickly and efficiently.
If we start doing the "Because it increases health costs," you actually might find the ban being on GOOD behaviour. See a major problem that many people don't want to acknowledge with health care costs is that a ton of the cost comes in end of life care. People are living to such old ages now that their bodies start just breaking down. A longer life is often paid for by a protracted spiral towards death.
Well, a good way to keep those costs down would be for people to die younger. It turns out that a morbidly obese person who dies of a heart attack at 55 costs a hell of a lot less than a healthy person that lives to 90, but spends from 85 on needing continual expensive care.
So if you start going on this "We are going to ban lifestyle choices that cost more," you might well find that being too healthy is something they go after. Try to extend your life? Not so fast there, we need you to die before you get too old to keep costs down!
My grandma is a great example. She is quickly sliding down the path of Alzheimer's. She cannot care for herself any longer, and soon (a year or so) won't even know who she is. However, she's in reasonably good health for her age, she easily has 3-5 more years left (possibly more). However during that time she needs full time case, as well as treatment for a number of medical conditions. She is costing a ton (she's got plenty of money so it is no issue). It would be much cheaper had she died younger, even if it had meant more healthcare costs throughout her life. One year of good managed care is more than most spend in a couple decades on healthcare normally.
The whole reason why insurance is worth it is because those in health pay for those in sickness. Or another way of looking at it is when you are in good health and low risk you are willing to pay the cost in case something changes and you are not.
If we start dividing everyone down and charging (or simply denying insurance) based on risk then it becomes something that nobody but the healthy will have, who don't really need it anyhow.
What I find funny is this is one of the things people hate on insurance companies for: That they want to deny people insurance, or charge more, based on prior history. However suddenly when it comes down to smoking, well they are ok with it. It's fine to deny smokers insurance but don't you dare deny me insurance for my high blood pressure! That kind of thing.
We have to accept that some people are going to cost more for health care. It can be because of their genetics, it can be because of bad luck, it can be because of lifestyle choices. However unless we want to start up with a tyrannical system of dictating what is and is not ok to do in your life we have to just accept that.
I'm ok with having to pay more insurance if it means I get to live in a free society. I don't want to be told how I must live my life, even if it ends up being how I do live my life anyhow, just to save money. Yes people are going to make bad choices. That's life.
I also don't want to start down that path because it is the path down which eugenics lie. Smoking does carry an increase in health costs, but nothing like some other conditions such as diabetes, or severe physical disabilities, and so on. These are what really push up health costs. My boss's wife is a great example. Confined to a wheelchair due to a car accident, her healthcare costs are 5 figures or more a year. She also can't work because of her condition. She is EXPENSIVE to the health care system (thankfully we have good insurance at work).
If you start arguing "We need to stop people from doing anything dangerous because it costs more," it becomes a rather small leap to saying "We shouldn't pay to treat X condition, it is just too expensive."
The higher your frequency, the worse your range/penetration. You can see the difference even with 2.4GHz vs 5GHz. In my place, I can get full signal bars in my bedroom with 2.4GHz, but only 2 or so with 5GHz, from the same router. For a more extreme example look at the Navy's Seafarer system, which operated at 78Hz, and literally penetrated the entire earth, and compare it to visible light, which is 100s of THz, and is stopped by any solid substance.
Processors are very much a Yoda situation of "Do or do not, there is no try." For high end servers, there is a market for non-x86 stuff. However to be in it, you need to be up on the curve, you need to invest real resources in development. On the other hand you can just get our of it and buy product form someone else, probably Intel but IBM or Hitachi are options. It is expensive, deciding not to compete is 100% valid.
However half-assing it is going to lead to nothing but wasted money. You can't decide you "kinda" want to do your own architecture which is what Oracle seems to have done. They've cut funding to the UltraSparc development but they won't kill it. Well, all that means is you are wasting money on something less and less people will want. Either accept that it is something you have to sink some serious cash in to, or write it off.
Go look it up. Juries have the ability to nullify on account of an innocent verdict being un-reviewable. The prohibition against double jeopardy means that once someone has been found innocent it is done, no further review. They do not have the power as a specific matter of law.
Judges technically have a nullification power too for the same reason. If a judge dismisses a case after it has come to trial, it is done. As soon as it goes to trial, jeopardy applies, no retrial.
People always whine about how courts seem to not want people with expertise in an area, and this is the reason. The jury is meant to be the judge of fact, not the judge of law (the judge is the judge of law). So the idea is they are given a set of evidence, and told what the law is and how to apply it, and then, in that context only, they are to decide what the facts show. They aren't to use outside information, they aren't to use their own supposed understanding. They consider the evidence presented and the law as instructed.
The whole idea is so you don't have an armchair lawyer with a hazy understanding of the law making bad decisions. You don't want someone who says "I'm an expert on this, listen to me," and turns out to be wrong, or motivated by something else.
The jury is not supposed to be an investigative force or anything. They are just supposed to judge the facts they are given in the context of the law they are instructed. Hence while you don't want people who are "stupid" in terms of low IQ, you do want people who do not have a background in the case. You want people who will consider things with an open mind, not come in assuming they know how things should go already.
Guess what? He doesn't get to make that decision. The judge wanted to know ever? That's the judge's call. When it comes to jury selection, they get to decide what is relevant. Doesn't mean you'll be excluded, but they want to know.
For example I was in the pool for a marajuna case (way at the end, so unlikely I'd get on the jury) and the subject of criminal record came up. For employment they can ask about felonies in the last I believe 7 years. The court has wider latitude for juries. So one guy, he was probably 45 or 50, says ya I have a guilty plea for auto theft when I was 18. Judge asks more about it, it was a "young and stupid" kind of thing, his civil rights have been fully restored, and so on. He ended up being on the jury.
It is the kind of thing he wouldn't reveal to an employer, but the court got to ask. They weren't dicks about it, like I said he sat on the jury, but the judge gets to weigh it and make a decision.
So CPT Armchair Lawyer here doesn't get to decide how long they are allowed to ask about. If they asked ever, they get to ask ever.
As I said about my idiot thing. No people are not makiing anything. They are making very few things.
The only gun part I've seen made is the lower reciever to an AR-15. This is the part that takes the least stress, and is quite cheap (they cost about $50 for a basic stamped lower, $150ish for a nice mahcined one). This is not the business part of the gun. Go ahead and print a barrel and chamber, see how it does. Just be warned: It has to withstand about 63,000 PSI so good luck there. You try it, I'd make sure ti fire it remotely if you value your hands.
Keys? So what? That is easy to do. We can make keys out of plastic, but we don't because they wear out too fast. That you can make a handcuff master key is not surprising: They ALL open on one key. This is by design. They are not meant to be perminant restraints, just temporary. The ability to open them is more important than maximum security.
You have to understand I work in a building with labratory crade 3D printers. They are really cool. The objet spit out a little plastic wrech as a test, you can even adjust it and everything. However it is not going to replace our actual adjustable wrench on account of it not being nearly as strong as the steel one.
Also, as I said, they can't do anything that is electronic, at all. Have a look at your devices, I bet most of them have an electronic component to them.
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No it really isn't MS's problem. Basically hardware vendors are responsible for driver support. They are welcome to support whatever OSes they like. Many vendors discontinue support for old OSes with new hardware. Since people with old OSes don't tend to get new hardware, they find it not worth their while to spend time working on it.
Same deal with software. For example Cakewalk has discontinued XP support with Sonar X2. Since it is nearing EOL, they don't feel it worth their while to test their new software on an old OS.
If you want a company that updates their OS forever, well good luck with that unless you are willing to pay a hefty service contract. Even then you will probably discover the updates will be little more than bug fixes, and if you want support for new hardware they'll require you to update to a new version.
Seriously trying to whine about MS requiring people to occasionally upgrade their OS is rather stupid. They support their OSes for quite a long time, 10 years is the standard support but some are extended (like XP). That is pretty damn good, rare you find other OSes with support that long.
So XP is now coming to an end of that support. You can upgrade to 7 or 8, which have guaranteed support until 2020 or 2023 respectively.
Oh, and Windows 8 works just fine on older hardware, as does Windows 7 (yes we've tested it at work).
Enough with the silliness.
For one, licensing agreements are something that once done are done. They are not written with a "But we can take it back if we want," clause. So Intel has the rights to x64 once and for all time. What's more, it comes from older cross licensing with x86 that AMD has. More or less the situation is that both companies have to share with each other, by contract. Intel can't keep AMD from using x86, including new features (which is why they tried for IA64) but the reverse is AMD can't keep Intel from using x86 stuff they develop.
Now if you are talking about back in the day, well had AMD been able to keep Intel form using x64 (they couldn't but let's just say) then all that likely would have happened is x64 would have died off. Its success is because it is easily compatible with old programs and because new CPUs from both the firms worked with it. If Intel CPUs couldn't support it, there would have been much less interest.
They had a faster processor, but that is only one part of the equation. They had two major problems:
1) They didn't offer a CPU/chipset/mobo solution. Intel does it all for customers, they make the entire core if you want. This is useful to OEMs because there's no finger pointing when there's problems. Doesn't matter which of those components is broken, same company is responsible, they need to find and implement the fix. With the Athlons you could have a 3 way pointing match between AMD, VIA, and whoever made the board all claiming the other guy was responsible for a problem.
2) No good chipset. The processor was all kinds of fast but woe betide you if you wanted to use it with, say a GeForce DDR. The VIA chipset that was the "premier" solution for it implemented the AGP spec improperly and wouldn't work with the GeForce card since the AGP slot wasn't really AGP, basically just a fast PCI slot. This wasn't the only problem, just one of the most major ones.
So it is no surprise that some OEMs shied away from them. I built an Athlon system and it was a couple weeks of hell trying to make it work before I found out that no, there was just no way my GeForce would work with it. Back the parts went and in came Intel parts that functioned without error.
Likewise at work we did have some Athlon systems, Gateway I believe, and they were far more trouble than the Intel systems as a whole.
Intel isn't just popular because of the power, but their stability. It matters in business. AMD never really had a competitive solution in that regard.
I'm not saying Intel didn't also try to squash AMD (IA64 was another attempt, since there is no cross licensing for that instruction set) but AMD did little to help themselves. They produced a good processor without the hardware to support it.
Then they caught another break, with the fuckup that was the P4, but they rested on their laurels and didn't really do much in the way of architecture updates. Intel hit back with the Core 2, then Core i, then Sandy Bridge all of which are stellar performers per clock and there was just nothing new from AMD, until now Bulldozer which is pathetic, worse than their old chips at times.
Intel is not blameless, but AMD has done themselves few favours.
Also even when Intel announces something, they don't release it until the supply chain is full. When the Ivy Bridge launched, you could get it from every OEM, every online retailers, and in quantity. There was none of this "Just a few parts that sell out quickly." You could buy more or less as much Ivy Bridge as you wanted, from whomever you wanted.
Not saying that is the only way to do things, but I can respect that. Intel's launches are very hard launches. They have made sure there are plenty of parts ready to go so that people can buy them. GPU vendors often do very soft launches, where only a few parts are out there and they are perpetually out of stock as new units are produced, until finally the chain gets saturated.
The pricing is, but not the CPUs. The problem is there is a finite amount of 22nm capacity. Right now Intel has only one 22nm fab online. They are in the process of converting their fab in Israel to 22nm, but right now the one in Chandler is it.
That being the case, there is only so much they can choose to produce on that process, and what they are choosing to do is mainstream desktop and laptop processors. They've changed their strategy from using the newest process to the highest end parts first to using it for more mainstream parts, and then moving it in to high end.
You also can't just say "Well build more capacity!" as not only are they doing that, but it takes a long time (you don't order this stuff online and install it in a day) and costs a ton of money.
I fully agree that Intel reams people on prices because they can. I mean their low end i5 is as good as AMD's top end Bulldozer for most things. However supply issues are something else. They have to choose what chips to produce in their fabs, and only certain fabs are at certain levels.
You also can't hate on Intel for their fab investment. They pump more money in to fab technology than anyone else (hence are nearly always a node ahead) and they build most of them in the US. They are really big on R&D and it pays off.
This idea that we could build a magical "exploit proof" OS if only we want to bad enough is stupid. While some exploits happen because of stupid design decisions, far more happen because of simple unintended consequences.
With an OS you are in the difficult position of needing to offer access but trying to keep out unauthorized access, and to do so in an ecosystem of arbitrary software on the system. That's a real hard problem to solve. Any time you build a door, it can be used for both wanted and unwanted visitors to enter through.
So sure, you can completely secure something by completely securing it from being accessed, but then it isn't useful. If you want to have an OS that connects to the Internet, which is totally wild and untamed, and you want to be able to have end users install arbitrary software, and you want to let it be used in arbitrary ways, well it'll be open to exploits. Design as carefully as you like, something unintended will pop up at some point.
The more you lock it down, the more secure it'll be, but the less useful.
There's no magic bullet, were there, it would already be in use. It is all tradeoffs. That's why some systems that need to be really secure are in a situation where they can only run verified code, and they are not on public networks and can only be accessed in specified ways and so on. Even that isn't perfect, just better.
People need to understand that digital security really is like physical security: There is NO perfect security. There in only defense in depth, practice monitoring and mitigation, and eternal vigilance.
You see that all the time with BTC types. They love the idea of deflation because in their minds, it means that their money gets worth more over time and that is a good thing. They fail to consider the larger economic implications of it, thinking in the narrow sense of their savings accounts only.
A friend who was a coastie told a story about a sub messing with them:
The guy watching the radar grabbed the first officer because he was confused. He was seeing an occasional weak reading from behind them, a real small return like a little boat or something, fairly close, but when he'd look there was nothing out there. It was daytime, plenty of visibility, all that. It was inconsistent, not always there. Nothing seemed to be wrong with the radar. The XO saw this too, so they grabbed my friend and had him continually monitor aft to see what was going on.
The answer? A sub goofing around. It would raise up part of its sail, wait until it got hit with the radar (they have ESM antennas) and then dive. When it came back up again, my friend flashed Morse at it with a light and the sub then surfaced and came over to say hi.
It wasn't an exercise or anything, just a sub screwing around. Was it against Navy regs? I dunno, probably, but the sub was doing it anyways and it wasn't like anyone got in trouble. Everyone had a laugh and the sub went on its way.
There has been far, far too many delays and political fuckery with this. I'm glad to hear it is finally going online.
Satellite navigation is just very important to everything these days (it is the primary nav method for all planes, ships, etc). Having everything rely on GPS, and thus on the budget the US chooses to spend keeping it working, is not a good idea.
This will make things much more reliable since, after an initial hissing match, the US and EU settled down and the systems play nice together and you'll be able to get devices that use both for better accuracy and reliability.
Ultimately all it will do is lead to nVidia not supporting Optimus on Linux. People need to remember that their "give a shit" index for Linux is way less than Windows to begin with. Then understand that most of their market in Linux is high end stuff like visualization workstations, CUDA compute systems, and so on. Linux laptops are not a big thing. It just is not a large enough market for them to care all that much.
So what that means is that they might well support it, if they can do so with a reasonably small amount of resources. However if it ends up being a real problem, they'll probably just write it off and not bother.
The ideological crap with regards to the GPL pisses me off. I think it is wonderful that LInux itself is GPL, however they shouldn't be hostile to non-GPL software. To me it would be as stupid as Windows refusing to allow an open source driver or program to run. There is no reason Linux shouldn't have a good setup to work with binary only drivers.
Developers need to understand that to most people, computers are tools and they are pragmatic about it. They want the tool that does the job well. So if you go and let ideology get in the way of usability, they'll just ignore you and look elsewhere.
They have many licensed components in their code. So they have to remove all that and rework it, and do it in such a fashion as to not get sued by those companies (who might claim that the nVidia programmers couldn't work on the new code since they'd seen the licensed code). This isn't just some more minor features such as S3 texture compression, but OpenGL itself. Go look it up, OpenGL isn't a free "do whatever you like" setup. There is licensing for it for companies like nVidia.
Even worse is that because the issue isn't just opening the source, but actually GPLing it, that makes it so much harder. Some of their licensed components are things the companies might be ok with source distribution. However nVidia doesn't have the right to relicense that code under the GPL. So even if they opened it, it wouldn't do any good as the GPL is what is required here.
So the argument of "just open the driver" is somewhat unrealistic. It isn't just that nVidia likes to have a competitive edge, though they surely do, but that it would be a major issue and a lot more work to try and do so, if it were even possible.
Again, take the OpenGL issue since it is a pretty fundamental one. nVidia licenses the code and has the latest OpenGL 4.3 implemented on cards that support it. Ok so let's say they decide to grab the Mesa code for an OSS branch. It's MIT license which is GPL compatible so good to go right? Well, not really. Mesa is OpenGL 3.1, 3 years out of date, and it only recently got that. So they can either deal without a bunch of features on all platforms, have two different drivers one full featured on Windows and such, one with less features, or they can invest a ton of work to try and make their own up to date OSS OpenGL implementation and hope they aren't sued.
None of those sound like very good uses of resources.
And who is going to host that for them? The problem is that they don't have the money to set something like that up, and without it set up, it isn't low latency. You seem to have this idea like this is some inevitable path, it really isn't. It is the kind of thing for which there is a very limited time people would even be interested.
As technology keeps improving you get better graphics/gameplay out of lesser systems. When cheap devices have powerful chips there is just much less reason to try and process shit remotely.
Hosting data remotely makes sense, when feasible, and I can full and well see the day when you'll basically download games (and other apps) on demand. However processing it all remotely and streaming the video doesn't unless you can get better quality for less money doing so. Well, as chips get cheaper and more powerful, that is harder and harder to do.
A system like Steam extended to a more "on demand" sort of thing (where assets are streamed as needed) makes sense and I'm sure we'll see. A system where you run games on a server farm, rather than the devices you have does not make sense.
Two issues:
1) Latency is still a problem. This idea that they'd ever be in local data centers all over the world is just stupid. That is expensive and difficult to do. The whole appeal of "cloud" type of stuff is you don't have to give a shit where you host. You pay someone like Amazon who has massive data centers in a couple locations to deal with your shit. So they'll always have interface latency problems.
2) In 10 years, it'll be an even harder sell over cheap hardware. What low end hardware can do keeps going up and up. 10 years ago integrated graphics were so bad they sucked for Windows itself, never mind games, and phones were monochrome character based deals. Now games officially support Integrated graphics as they are good enough and our phones run the Unreal Engine 3. Give that 10 more years and cheap hardware is going to be awful hard to compete with.
So when you are talking latency for something like interactive video, you have to take in to account the amount of time it takes to transfer a frame on top of the round trip packet time. So this means to keep latency down you need to set your stream to less than the bandwidth you are going to require, significantly less.
Onlive used a 1mbps stream. That is not at all enough to do quality 720p video, never mind when you are trying to do it at 60fps as they were. Just not enough bits for all the data you want. So you are going to get artifacting and all that jazz. Of course this is on top of the inherent quality loss that video compression these days does like chroma subsampling and so on.
There's just no way to make it work well, unless everyone has much faster connections, and even then there'll still be interface lag from the latency.
That aside there's the problem that never mind consoles, it is cheap to upgrade your computer. If you've a reasonably modern computer for about $100 you can drop in a pretty good discrete GPU and all of a sudden the thing is good at playing games. That is the only thing most new systems lack, CPUs are all kinds of powerful, it is hard to get something without 4GB of RAM, they just don't have dedicated GPUs.
For that matter, the integrated Intel GPUs are getting pretty good. Games are officially supporting the Intel HD 3000 and 4000 series GPUs. No, you can't crank things up but they run surprisingly well. I've messed with it on my laptop which has switchable graphics.
As such their only market is people with really old computers that can't be upgraded, or low end un-upgradable computers like netbooks. Neither are groups that are likely to drop a lot of coin on gaming. Oh, and of course they have to have good internet to use it.
It just isn't a sensible business model. To the extent we ever have "cloud gaming" it will be a case of hardware that renders locally and just downloads the binaries/assets in an on demand fashion from a data center. It solves all the interface lag, compression, etc problems and really hardware is cheap and getting cheaper.
There are more of them now than when they were the only computers there were. Now that still isn't many compared to desktops, but the market is as big as it has ever been. They have been eclipsed by other devices, but not killed off and show no signs of dying.
Same kind of deal with desktops/laptops.
I have a friend who doesn't work for a company that does bonuses like that, but still is a "moar hours = moar better" kind of place. My friend is a nice guy but... not as competent as one might hope. Back when we both worked at the same place another co-worker described him as someone who "Broke down big rocks in to little rocks and then glued the rocks back together." Basically he has a lot of enthusiasm, but ends up spending a lot of time fixing problems he created by not having a good understanding what he was doing and being careful.
Well he keeps trying to convince me to come work for his new company. He is so happy because he makes a lot more money. They also think he's one of their best employees. That right there tells me all I need to know, and that I'd hate it. He's the kind of guy who will work 10-12 hour days 6-7 days a week. However much of that time is spent fixing problems he created. He replaces finesse with brute force. He does get things done, but no faster than someone "works smarter" to steal a management cliche and often slower.
The reason they think he's great is because he's always at work. He's a "hard worker". They value face time, not results. That is all kinds of not my place. I want a place, and work at a place, that is happy if you can solve a problem quickly and efficiently.
If we start doing the "Because it increases health costs," you actually might find the ban being on GOOD behaviour. See a major problem that many people don't want to acknowledge with health care costs is that a ton of the cost comes in end of life care. People are living to such old ages now that their bodies start just breaking down. A longer life is often paid for by a protracted spiral towards death.
Well, a good way to keep those costs down would be for people to die younger. It turns out that a morbidly obese person who dies of a heart attack at 55 costs a hell of a lot less than a healthy person that lives to 90, but spends from 85 on needing continual expensive care.
So if you start going on this "We are going to ban lifestyle choices that cost more," you might well find that being too healthy is something they go after. Try to extend your life? Not so fast there, we need you to die before you get too old to keep costs down!
My grandma is a great example. She is quickly sliding down the path of Alzheimer's. She cannot care for herself any longer, and soon (a year or so) won't even know who she is. However, she's in reasonably good health for her age, she easily has 3-5 more years left (possibly more). However during that time she needs full time case, as well as treatment for a number of medical conditions. She is costing a ton (she's got plenty of money so it is no issue). It would be much cheaper had she died younger, even if it had meant more healthcare costs throughout her life. One year of good managed care is more than most spend in a couple decades on healthcare normally.
The whole reason why insurance is worth it is because those in health pay for those in sickness. Or another way of looking at it is when you are in good health and low risk you are willing to pay the cost in case something changes and you are not.
If we start dividing everyone down and charging (or simply denying insurance) based on risk then it becomes something that nobody but the healthy will have, who don't really need it anyhow.
What I find funny is this is one of the things people hate on insurance companies for: That they want to deny people insurance, or charge more, based on prior history. However suddenly when it comes down to smoking, well they are ok with it. It's fine to deny smokers insurance but don't you dare deny me insurance for my high blood pressure! That kind of thing.
We have to accept that some people are going to cost more for health care. It can be because of their genetics, it can be because of bad luck, it can be because of lifestyle choices. However unless we want to start up with a tyrannical system of dictating what is and is not ok to do in your life we have to just accept that.
I'm ok with having to pay more insurance if it means I get to live in a free society. I don't want to be told how I must live my life, even if it ends up being how I do live my life anyhow, just to save money. Yes people are going to make bad choices. That's life.
I also don't want to start down that path because it is the path down which eugenics lie. Smoking does carry an increase in health costs, but nothing like some other conditions such as diabetes, or severe physical disabilities, and so on. These are what really push up health costs. My boss's wife is a great example. Confined to a wheelchair due to a car accident, her healthcare costs are 5 figures or more a year. She also can't work because of her condition. She is EXPENSIVE to the health care system (thankfully we have good insurance at work).
If you start arguing "We need to stop people from doing anything dangerous because it costs more," it becomes a rather small leap to saying "We shouldn't pay to treat X condition, it is just too expensive."
The higher your frequency, the worse your range/penetration. You can see the difference even with 2.4GHz vs 5GHz. In my place, I can get full signal bars in my bedroom with 2.4GHz, but only 2 or so with 5GHz, from the same router. For a more extreme example look at the Navy's Seafarer system, which operated at 78Hz, and literally penetrated the entire earth, and compare it to visible light, which is 100s of THz, and is stopped by any solid substance.
60GHz does not have very good penetration.
Processors are very much a Yoda situation of "Do or do not, there is no try." For high end servers, there is a market for non-x86 stuff. However to be in it, you need to be up on the curve, you need to invest real resources in development. On the other hand you can just get our of it and buy product form someone else, probably Intel but IBM or Hitachi are options. It is expensive, deciding not to compete is 100% valid.
However half-assing it is going to lead to nothing but wasted money. You can't decide you "kinda" want to do your own architecture which is what Oracle seems to have done. They've cut funding to the UltraSparc development but they won't kill it. Well, all that means is you are wasting money on something less and less people will want. Either accept that it is something you have to sink some serious cash in to, or write it off.
Go look it up. Juries have the ability to nullify on account of an innocent verdict being un-reviewable. The prohibition against double jeopardy means that once someone has been found innocent it is done, no further review. They do not have the power as a specific matter of law.
Judges technically have a nullification power too for the same reason. If a judge dismisses a case after it has come to trial, it is done. As soon as it goes to trial, jeopardy applies, no retrial.
Go read up on the actual way the law works.
People always whine about how courts seem to not want people with expertise in an area, and this is the reason. The jury is meant to be the judge of fact, not the judge of law (the judge is the judge of law). So the idea is they are given a set of evidence, and told what the law is and how to apply it, and then, in that context only, they are to decide what the facts show. They aren't to use outside information, they aren't to use their own supposed understanding. They consider the evidence presented and the law as instructed.
The whole idea is so you don't have an armchair lawyer with a hazy understanding of the law making bad decisions. You don't want someone who says "I'm an expert on this, listen to me," and turns out to be wrong, or motivated by something else.
The jury is not supposed to be an investigative force or anything. They are just supposed to judge the facts they are given in the context of the law they are instructed. Hence while you don't want people who are "stupid" in terms of low IQ, you do want people who do not have a background in the case. You want people who will consider things with an open mind, not come in assuming they know how things should go already.
Guess what? He doesn't get to make that decision. The judge wanted to know ever? That's the judge's call. When it comes to jury selection, they get to decide what is relevant. Doesn't mean you'll be excluded, but they want to know.
For example I was in the pool for a marajuna case (way at the end, so unlikely I'd get on the jury) and the subject of criminal record came up. For employment they can ask about felonies in the last I believe 7 years. The court has wider latitude for juries. So one guy, he was probably 45 or 50, says ya I have a guilty plea for auto theft when I was 18. Judge asks more about it, it was a "young and stupid" kind of thing, his civil rights have been fully restored, and so on. He ended up being on the jury.
It is the kind of thing he wouldn't reveal to an employer, but the court got to ask. They weren't dicks about it, like I said he sat on the jury, but the judge gets to weigh it and make a decision.
So CPT Armchair Lawyer here doesn't get to decide how long they are allowed to ask about. If they asked ever, they get to ask ever.
As I said about my idiot thing. No people are not makiing anything. They are making very few things.
The only gun part I've seen made is the lower reciever to an AR-15. This is the part that takes the least stress, and is quite cheap (they cost about $50 for a basic stamped lower, $150ish for a nice mahcined one). This is not the business part of the gun. Go ahead and print a barrel and chamber, see how it does. Just be warned: It has to withstand about 63,000 PSI so good luck there. You try it, I'd make sure ti fire it remotely if you value your hands.
Keys? So what? That is easy to do. We can make keys out of plastic, but we don't because they wear out too fast. That you can make a handcuff master key is not surprising: They ALL open on one key. This is by design. They are not meant to be perminant restraints, just temporary. The ability to open them is more important than maximum security.
You have to understand I work in a building with labratory crade 3D printers. They are really cool. The objet spit out a little plastic wrech as a test, you can even adjust it and everything. However it is not going to replace our actual adjustable wrench on account of it not being nearly as strong as the steel one.
Also, as I said, they can't do anything that is electronic, at all. Have a look at your devices, I bet most of them have an electronic component to them.
Cool toys, not home manufacturing stations.