Why shouldn't bad drivers crash Windows? They crash pretty much every other OS. My computer (which is 100% Linux) crashes sometimes due to a bad webcam driver.
Okay, WTF is a 'synergistic' gain? And multiple CPUs/CPU cores doesn't even give you a simple additive gain due to the overhead of parallelizing tasks to take advantage of multiple streams of execution as well as basic synchronisation overhead. Basic computer science.
Yes, and if you designed a piece of silicon with a few thousand FPUs, then add in the support circuitry to keep those FPUs fed with data and you'll have a piece of silicon the size of Rhode Island.
If we're talking plows... I prefer the PL2. It's a Subsea plow owned by Saipem and it looks mean (it gets used to trenching things like undersea oil/gas pipelines and fibre optics)
You can see some brief info on it here. The thing weighs 150 tonnes, and operates at depths of up to 400m. Not the kind of beast you want to meet in a dark alley at night.;P
I disagree. Royal Mail (the UK postal service) is very good. Twice daily deliveries in most places, six days a week. I put a letter in the mail, it shows up the next day, and I've never seen anything get lost. Of course it's a much smaller country, so it's easier to be good and fast.:)
Still, though the UK does have a long tradition of an excellent postal service.
If you want an example of a 'good' interface, take a look at ColorForth. It's not flashy at all, but it's an example of what you can get when some thought is put into a user interface.
No, it's not what I'd call a general user interface, but it encapsulates a lot of good ideas about comptuer interaction which could easily be generalised and carried over to more traditional GUIs.
Incorporated companies, limited companies, etc... limit the liabilities of the owners or shareholders of companies, not the directors. If you are a director (or officer) of a company you can in fact be held personally liable (both in a civil sense and a criminal sense) for quite a few things.
Why shouldn't they comapare Maple to Mathematica? Maple may not be as pretty as Mathematica, but it's a more powerful symbolic computation engine.
And I'm not sure how you got the academic version for free, since the academic version costs almost $200! You can imagine how much a non-academic license costs.
Reading a lot of the posts people have made here so far is quite disheartening. Has everybody become so cynical that they reject any slightly outlandish claim without critical thought simply because 'everybody knows anti-gravity is impossible'. Right, everybody knew flying was impossible. Everybody knew going to the moon is impossible. We shouldn't just immediately dismiss the possibility - even if it is a one in a million chance, the potential pay off makes it worth while.
That being said, there are several reasons why I'm willing to consider the possibility that Dr. Podkletnov was onto something.
First, he never claimed it was an 'anti-gravity' device. When he and his associates wrote the paper, the editor of the journal they submitted it to leaked the paper to a British newspaper. He was the person who started throwing around the term anti-gravity. Of course, after this got out the paper was withdrawn under pressure from the scientific community at large and most of the co-authors withdrew their support from the paper. Dr. Podkletnov didn't, and was fired. What motivated the editor to leak the paper and use the phrase 'anti-gravity'? I've no clue, but this is certainly a major reason why so much of the scientific community was immediately skeptical.
While some people have attempted to reproduce the experiment, you have to remember these are mostly people primarily with an interest in the gravity side. Dr. Podkletnov is a materials physicist, an expert in super-conductors. The super-conductor they were experimenting with was an experimental one. The researchers at NASA admit that despite having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the experiment they have yet to reproduce the experimental conditions (the major stumbling block is the super-conductor, they are having difficulty in reproducing it... unsurprising since I believe none of them are experts in the production and manafacture of experimental superconductors).
You can't think about this simply from a newtonian (as some posters shockingly have) or a general relativity stand-point. Superconductors aren't fully understood, but their behaviour comes from quantum mechanical properties, consequently you have to consider this using quantum gravity. And if you thought superconductors were mysterious... very little is known about quantum gravity. It is one of the very hot topics in theoretical physics these days.
In a later paper, Dr. Podkletnov co-authored with an Italian theoretical physicist (and expert in quantum gravity). The Italian physicist has a fairly respectable C.V. (as did Podkletnov before he was fired for his research), including some time at the Fermi Institute and other high-profile physics research institutions, and offers a theoretical explanation of the effects Podkletnov claims to have observed. Of course, this is an observation, not a prediction, so take it with a grain of salt.
A physicist at Berkley announced recently that he had developed a theory under which superconductors in certain situations could interact with gravitomagnetic fields in non-classical ways. Gravitomagnetism is related to gravity in the same way that magnetism is related electricity.
At least three big names are interested enough to spend money exploring the possibility. NASA, Boeing and BAe.
So I've got a few reasons to watch this research with interest and frankly hope. I won't be planning on owning a flying car a few years down the road. Healthy skepticism is a good thing, and extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof, but if you immediately dismiss an idea as outlandish and never give it a chance, you'll never get your extraordinary proof no matter how solid an idea it was in the first place.
It's sad in a way... modern physics may become a victim of its own success. For hundreds of years our understanding of science was furthered by people doing stuff, noticing something strange and trying to figure out why it happened. Of course, now we've got quantum mechanics which is just so goddamned good at what it does (i.e., modeling the subatomic universe) that anything which comes along and isn't explainable under the current theory is immediately dismissed after a half-assed attempt at reproducing. This isn't the way science is supposed to work! This is particularly sad since we already know that quantum mechanics is incomplete.
Come on people! Where's your sense of wonder? This is potentially the greatest scientific discovery in seventy years! But if it's never given a chance to prove itself, it'll become the greatest scientific non-discovery.
The Ottawa man was convicted for both piracy, and selling the mod-chips.
The reason selling the mod-chips was illegal in his case was since he was selling them with the intend of them be used in a crime (in this case, piracy). Had he simply been selling the mod-chips without the massive piracy operation (as it appears is the case with this Australian) he wouldn't have been convicted either.
Any economist will tell you that frictional unemployment is 6%!
Maybe in Europe it is, in the US the full employment level is closer to 3-4%.
Quick lesson in basic economics for those who don't know the term: Unemployment can be classified into three basic categories: frictional, cyclical and structural.
Structural unemployment is due to people being unemployed since they don't have the skills to find work where they live; a good example of this were the Canadian maritime provinces about a decade ago - a lot of people were unemployed when the cod fisheries were shut down (due to chronic overfishing, there weren't any left). This unemployment is structural: there were jobs available, but the fishermen didn't have the skills to be able to do them. Structural unemployment is usually solved through government sponsored retraining programs.
Cyclical unemployment is what you get during a recession. People in this category have skills that are needed, but due to an economic downtirm companies cannot afford to hire them. They are usually unemployed for long periods of time, but find work again when the economic recovers.
Frictional unemployment is what this poster is describing. It is ever present in an economy and is also known as the full employment level (when all that is left is frictional unemployment an economy is said to be at full employment). It consists of people who are between jobs for short periods of time (people deciding to change careers, looking for better prospects, getting fired for being an idiot, etc...). An economy running below this level is overheating, and the usual symptom of this is high inflation.
The US actually has one of the lowest frictional unemployment levels in the world. This is not a good or a bad thing. Most other developed countries have better social security nets so people can afford to go between jobs for longer and consequently be more picky in what they choose. The higher frictional unemployment is then balanced out by higher individual productivity.
This is a 10,000 ft. overview. Real economic models get a lot more complicated.:)
going to school, bumming around Europe, dropping a kid, "finding themselves", or just jerking off
Actually, none of those will classify you as unemployed. To be considered unemployed you have to be actively looking for work. If you think about that for a minute, you'll realise that unemployment is actually a skewed representation of a country's current economic condition.
Moreover, I predict that there will be a versioning nightmare. The content providers and software writers are going to have a terrible time trying to stay in sync on the data formats and protocols between the sources and clients. Slashdot changes all the time, for instance. What if you had just bought a karma monitor that had a cool numerical widget to keep tabs on your karma in real time? Now its useless, because karma isn't a number any more.
Webservices etc... are more of an extension to component models than anything. CORBA and COM have been happily dealing with versioning for years now. Versioning isn't a non-issue, but it's been solved many times before, and the techniques are well known.
Any technology whose utility can't be readily digested by the masses will fail. If you have to explain to a significant non-zero portion of tech-savvy slashdot users the value of a technology, what are the odds Aunt Bea will adopt it?
We don't. SOAP is XML over HTTP. Duh.:)
The point of using SOAP enabled webservices is it makes working with this kind of stuff trivially easy. You don't have to worry about dealing with HTTP headers, XML parsing, or a host of other issues. You just make a function call, the runtime handles everythign else.
It's not about creating a new protocol, but putting a friendlier face on ones that already exist. It doesn't expose any new functionality, it simply makes the functionality obvious and easy to use.
Re:Biggest announcement? Ha!
on
.NET for Apache
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· Score: 1
Any technology whose utility can't be readily digested by the masses will fail. If you have to explain to a significant non-zero portion of tech-savvy slashdot users the value of a technology, what are the odds Aunt Bea will adopt it?
Like the way the utility of relational databases wasn't readily digested by the masses, and they crumbled away and nobody ever heard from them again. Oh WAIT!
What matters is developer mindshare, not consumer, since these aren't consumer products. If Microsoft can create a tool which enables developers to write faster, better or cheaper systems, and can convince enough developers to use it, the technology will succede.
Currently Apple uses, as everybody knows, Motorola PowerPC processors; this is a monopolistically differentiated product (they don't have a monopoly in CPUs, but they have a monopoly in Mac CPUs, which is a differentiated product). Beyond simple economies of scale (which in reality aren't simple, this is a myth - economies of scale are hard to exploit) Apple is saddled with extra inefficiency since they're using a monopolistically differentiated product (for various supply and stocking reasons). Ignoring actual cost of the CPU, enhanced competition in the market for x86 chips, and a larger customer base will save Apple money (for example, you have $5 million of this old CPU in stock? Sell it to someone else).
However, despite this cost savings, I would argue that moving to x86 would be a bad idea. A lot of posters have suggested that Apple would use proprietary hardware: they wouldn't be producing a PC with MacOS, they'd be producing a Mac with a PC chip. There's only one problem with this, most of the hardware in Mac's is the same as you find in a PC (in fact, Apple's been using some substandard PC parts lately, IMHO). There would still be enough differences to prevent you from just installing MacOS X for x86 on a PC, I'm sure, but I'd like to bring to the community's attention two pieces of software: Linux and VMWare. I'd also like to bring to attention the fact that Darwin is open source. As soon as you switch from PowerPC to x86, you've removed the single largest obstacle to running MacOS on a PC: the need to emulate the CPU, and the overhead associated with that.
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if, 6 months after Apple moves over to x86, someone releases a piece of software that lets you install OS X on a normal PC. What happens to Apple then?
Of course, Apple has other choices than just x86, but they aren't very good ones. There are really three classes of CPU available on the market nowdays, hand-held/low-power CPUs like ARM and Dragonball, desktop CPUs (x86 and PowerPC) and high-end workstation/server CPUs (UltraSPARC, POWER4, IA64). Some posters have suggested moving to ARM, but last time I checked nobody has an ARM chip that's capable of matching the performance of the G4, P4 or Athlon4. A lot of posters have suggested the POWER4 or IA64. Have any of you people looked at how much these chips cost? If you think Macs are expensive now... imagine how much they'll cost when you slap a $5000 CPU in the box?
Apple's only real choice, in my opinion, is to switch their supplier of PowerPC chips to IBM. Considering Apple's start (and the whole 1984 ad stuff), am I the only one who finds this incredibly ironic?
It's all moot anyway. Motorolla has an exclusive contract with Apple to produce CPUs, and Apple will need a really good reason to justify cutting that off.
If you think AMD's x86-64 is a better design than IA-64 you've either not actually looked at either and are basing your viewpoint entirely from what you've read people posting on/., people who haven't looked at the designs either, or you really don't have a clue about chip design.
Alternatively, both could be true.
FYI, the IA-64 is a provocative, highly unusual (and innovative) design, but AMD's x86-64 is just a crappy, rush job.
A more serious matter would be the Pentium's lack of Altivec--the vector processing unit and the true power in the PowerPC chip that lets it keep up with Pentiums doing the same calculations in most instances, despite PPC chips having half the clock speed.
*cough*
Actually, Intel has has vector processing on its chips longer than Apple has - the current generation being SSE2 - which by all accounts are faster than Apple's AltiVec.
And don't forget that AltiVec is notoriously a pain in the ass to use, which is why almost nothing uses it (apart from Photoshop and a few small parts of OS X). Contrast this to x86, there are compilers available (including, but not limited to, Intel's C/C++ Compiler 5.0) which are capable of vectorizing normal code to use MMX/MMX2/SSE/SSE2 without requiring any work from the programmer at all (although for peak performance vectorization is still best performed by hand or through specialty libraries).
Not insurmountable things, however. I tire of the PowerPC production issues at Motorola. I would rather get IBM to make the chips--they should know how, since the PowerPC chip uses the same tech as in the POWER mainframe chips.
Of course IBM knows PowerPC - they designed it. And IBM would be a very good idea for Apple from a technical standpoint, since IBM knows how to build very fast PowerPC chips. Only one problem with this: Motorola has a contract with Apple to be the exclusive supplier of CPUs (with an exception that allows Apple to temporarily go to other manafacturers in case Motorola has supply issues).
Congratulations. Due to your fumbling, you failed, and even worse, hurt future efforts by making the carriers of those messages look bad by association.
The reason why people don't usually get a say in what a corporation does is because they don't care, or their money is invested through intermediaries. If you want a say in a corporation's operations, don't invest through intermediaries.
If you are a major shareholder, or can form an organization of shareholders that holds a major stake, you certainly do get a say in what the corporation's policies are! It's very simple, the corporation does what you want it to, or you put directors in charge who will do what you want them to.
Of course, this is a simplification, without getting into the differences between voting and non-voting shares, etc... but still the reason these corporations get away with everything is because, in the end, it's the bottom line that counts. Most people don't invest in companies they disagree with (instead of taking the logical solution, investing, and then using that investment to try to change the behaviour - of course if you do that you start hurting your own bottom line since you'll probably end up decreasing the corporation's profits, which get payed out to you and the other shareholders).
Very correct, Orwell WAS a socialist and a communist.
Then he saw the system at work in Soviet Russia, and changed his mind. Animal Farm is very much a commentary on the rise of the communism and its eventual corruption in Soviet Russia.
Remember, the truely intelligent are smart enough to know when they are wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, maybe not. If that non-prime happens to be 2^2031, I bet it'll make your encryption really weak. ;)
Why shouldn't bad drivers crash Windows? They crash pretty much every other OS. My computer (which is 100% Linux) crashes sometimes due to a bad webcam driver.
synergistic gain, not just an additive gain
Okay, WTF is a 'synergistic' gain? And multiple CPUs/CPU cores doesn't even give you a simple additive gain due to the overhead of parallelizing tasks to take advantage of multiple streams of execution as well as basic synchronisation overhead. Basic computer science.
Yes, and if you designed a piece of silicon with a few thousand FPUs, then add in the support circuitry to keep those FPUs fed with data and you'll have a piece of silicon the size of Rhode Island.
And you thought the XBox was big.
See subject.
If we're talking plows... I prefer the PL2. It's a Subsea plow owned by Saipem and it looks mean (it gets used to trenching things like undersea oil/gas pipelines and fibre optics)
You can see some brief info on it here. The thing weighs 150 tonnes, and operates at depths of up to 400m. Not the kind of beast you want to meet in a dark alley at night. ;P
I disagree. Royal Mail (the UK postal service) is very good. Twice daily deliveries in most places, six days a week. I put a letter in the mail, it shows up the next day, and I've never seen anything get lost. Of course it's a much smaller country, so it's easier to be good and fast. :)
Still, though the UK does have a long tradition of an excellent postal service.
UI and usability is actually the science of personal preferences.... =P
If you want an example of a 'good' interface, take a look at ColorForth. It's not flashy at all, but it's an example of what you can get when some thought is put into a user interface.
No, it's not what I'd call a general user interface, but it encapsulates a lot of good ideas about comptuer interaction which could easily be generalised and carried over to more traditional GUIs.
Incorporated companies, limited companies, etc... limit the liabilities of the owners or shareholders of companies, not the directors. If you are a director (or officer) of a company you can in fact be held personally liable (both in a civil sense and a criminal sense) for quite a few things.
Why shouldn't they comapare Maple to Mathematica? Maple may not be as pretty as Mathematica, but it's a more powerful symbolic computation engine.
And I'm not sure how you got the academic version for free, since the academic version costs almost $200! You can imagine how much a non-academic license costs.
Reading a lot of the posts people have made here so far is quite disheartening. Has everybody become so cynical that they reject any slightly outlandish claim without critical thought simply because 'everybody knows anti-gravity is impossible'. Right, everybody knew flying was impossible. Everybody knew going to the moon is impossible. We shouldn't just immediately dismiss the possibility - even if it is a one in a million chance, the potential pay off makes it worth while.
That being said, there are several reasons why I'm willing to consider the possibility that Dr. Podkletnov was onto something.
So I've got a few reasons to watch this research with interest and frankly hope. I won't be planning on owning a flying car a few years down the road. Healthy skepticism is a good thing, and extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof, but if you immediately dismiss an idea as outlandish and never give it a chance, you'll never get your extraordinary proof no matter how solid an idea it was in the first place.
It's sad in a way ... modern physics may become a victim of its own success. For hundreds of years our understanding of science was furthered by people doing stuff, noticing something strange and trying to figure out why it happened. Of course, now we've got quantum mechanics which is just so goddamned good at what it does (i.e., modeling the subatomic universe) that anything which comes along and isn't explainable under the current theory is immediately dismissed after a half-assed attempt at reproducing. This isn't the way science is supposed to work! This is particularly sad since we already know that quantum mechanics is incomplete.
Come on people! Where's your sense of wonder? This is potentially the greatest scientific discovery in seventy years! But if it's never given a chance to prove itself, it'll become the greatest scientific non-discovery.
The patent on breathing was awarded to IBM last year. They make you sign license agreements when you go through customs.
The Ottawa man was convicted for both piracy, and selling the mod-chips. The reason selling the mod-chips was illegal in his case was since he was selling them with the intend of them be used in a crime (in this case, piracy). Had he simply been selling the mod-chips without the massive piracy operation (as it appears is the case with this Australian) he wouldn't have been convicted either.
2% is reachable? Well, I suppose if you think hyper-inflation is acceptable. The American economy is at full employment at around 4%.
Any economist will tell you that frictional unemployment is 6%!
Maybe in Europe it is, in the US the full employment level is closer to 3-4%.
Quick lesson in basic economics for those who don't know the term: Unemployment can be classified into three basic categories: frictional, cyclical and structural.
Structural unemployment is due to people being unemployed since they don't have the skills to find work where they live; a good example of this were the Canadian maritime provinces about a decade ago - a lot of people were unemployed when the cod fisheries were shut down (due to chronic overfishing, there weren't any left). This unemployment is structural: there were jobs available, but the fishermen didn't have the skills to be able to do them. Structural unemployment is usually solved through government sponsored retraining programs.
Cyclical unemployment is what you get during a recession. People in this category have skills that are needed, but due to an economic downtirm companies cannot afford to hire them. They are usually unemployed for long periods of time, but find work again when the economic recovers.
Frictional unemployment is what this poster is describing. It is ever present in an economy and is also known as the full employment level (when all that is left is frictional unemployment an economy is said to be at full employment). It consists of people who are between jobs for short periods of time (people deciding to change careers, looking for better prospects, getting fired for being an idiot, etc...). An economy running below this level is overheating, and the usual symptom of this is high inflation.
The US actually has one of the lowest frictional unemployment levels in the world. This is not a good or a bad thing. Most other developed countries have better social security nets so people can afford to go between jobs for longer and consequently be more picky in what they choose. The higher frictional unemployment is then balanced out by higher individual productivity.
This is a 10,000 ft. overview. Real economic models get a lot more complicated. :)
going to school, bumming around Europe, dropping a kid, "finding themselves", or just jerking off
Actually, none of those will classify you as unemployed. To be considered unemployed you have to be actively looking for work. If you think about that for a minute, you'll realise that unemployment is actually a skewed representation of a country's current economic condition.
Moreover, I predict that there will be a versioning nightmare. The content providers and software writers are going to have a terrible time trying to stay in sync on the data formats and protocols between the sources and clients. Slashdot changes all the time, for instance. What if you had just bought a karma monitor that had a cool numerical widget to keep tabs on your karma in real time? Now its useless, because karma isn't a number any more.
Webservices etc... are more of an extension to component models than anything. CORBA and COM have been happily dealing with versioning for years now. Versioning isn't a non-issue, but it's been solved many times before, and the techniques are well known.
Any technology whose utility can't be readily digested by the masses will fail. If you have to explain to a significant non-zero portion of tech-savvy slashdot users the value of a technology, what are the odds Aunt Bea will adopt it?
We don't. SOAP is XML over HTTP. Duh. :)
The point of using SOAP enabled webservices is it makes working with this kind of stuff trivially easy. You don't have to worry about dealing with HTTP headers, XML parsing, or a host of other issues. You just make a function call, the runtime handles everythign else.
It's not about creating a new protocol, but putting a friendlier face on ones that already exist. It doesn't expose any new functionality, it simply makes the functionality obvious and easy to use.
Any technology whose utility can't be readily digested by the masses will fail. If you have to explain to a significant non-zero portion of tech-savvy slashdot users the value of a technology, what are the odds Aunt Bea will adopt it?
Like the way the utility of relational databases wasn't readily digested by the masses, and they crumbled away and nobody ever heard from them again. Oh WAIT!
What matters is developer mindshare, not consumer, since these aren't consumer products. If Microsoft can create a tool which enables developers to write faster, better or cheaper systems, and can convince enough developers to use it, the technology will succede.
Currently Apple uses, as everybody knows, Motorola PowerPC processors; this is a monopolistically differentiated product (they don't have a monopoly in CPUs, but they have a monopoly in Mac CPUs, which is a differentiated product). Beyond simple economies of scale (which in reality aren't simple, this is a myth - economies of scale are hard to exploit) Apple is saddled with extra inefficiency since they're using a monopolistically differentiated product (for various supply and stocking reasons). Ignoring actual cost of the CPU, enhanced competition in the market for x86 chips, and a larger customer base will save Apple money (for example, you have $5 million of this old CPU in stock? Sell it to someone else).
However, despite this cost savings, I would argue that moving to x86 would be a bad idea. A lot of posters have suggested that Apple would use proprietary hardware: they wouldn't be producing a PC with MacOS, they'd be producing a Mac with a PC chip. There's only one problem with this, most of the hardware in Mac's is the same as you find in a PC (in fact, Apple's been using some substandard PC parts lately, IMHO). There would still be enough differences to prevent you from just installing MacOS X for x86 on a PC, I'm sure, but I'd like to bring to the community's attention two pieces of software: Linux and VMWare. I'd also like to bring to attention the fact that Darwin is open source. As soon as you switch from PowerPC to x86, you've removed the single largest obstacle to running MacOS on a PC: the need to emulate the CPU, and the overhead associated with that.
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if, 6 months after Apple moves over to x86, someone releases a piece of software that lets you install OS X on a normal PC. What happens to Apple then?
Of course, Apple has other choices than just x86, but they aren't very good ones. There are really three classes of CPU available on the market nowdays, hand-held/low-power CPUs like ARM and Dragonball, desktop CPUs (x86 and PowerPC) and high-end workstation/server CPUs (UltraSPARC, POWER4, IA64). Some posters have suggested moving to ARM, but last time I checked nobody has an ARM chip that's capable of matching the performance of the G4, P4 or Athlon4. A lot of posters have suggested the POWER4 or IA64. Have any of you people looked at how much these chips cost? If you think Macs are expensive now... imagine how much they'll cost when you slap a $5000 CPU in the box?
Apple's only real choice, in my opinion, is to switch their supplier of PowerPC chips to IBM. Considering Apple's start (and the whole 1984 ad stuff), am I the only one who finds this incredibly ironic?
It's all moot anyway. Motorolla has an exclusive contract with Apple to produce CPUs, and Apple will need a really good reason to justify cutting that off.
If you think AMD's x86-64 is a better design than IA-64 you've either not actually looked at either and are basing your viewpoint entirely from what you've read people posting on /., people who haven't looked at the designs either, or you really don't have a clue about chip design.
Alternatively, both could be true.
FYI, the IA-64 is a provocative, highly unusual (and innovative) design, but AMD's x86-64 is just a crappy, rush job.
A more serious matter would be the Pentium's lack of Altivec--the vector processing unit and the true power in the PowerPC chip that lets it keep up with Pentiums doing the same calculations in most instances, despite PPC chips having half the clock speed.
*cough*
Actually, Intel has has vector processing on its chips longer than Apple has - the current generation being SSE2 - which by all accounts are faster than Apple's AltiVec.
And don't forget that AltiVec is notoriously a pain in the ass to use, which is why almost nothing uses it (apart from Photoshop and a few small parts of OS X). Contrast this to x86, there are compilers available (including, but not limited to, Intel's C/C++ Compiler 5.0) which are capable of vectorizing normal code to use MMX/MMX2/SSE/SSE2 without requiring any work from the programmer at all (although for peak performance vectorization is still best performed by hand or through specialty libraries).
Not insurmountable things, however. I tire of the PowerPC production issues at Motorola. I would rather get IBM to make the chips--they should know how, since the PowerPC chip uses the same tech as in the POWER mainframe chips.
Of course IBM knows PowerPC - they designed it. And IBM would be a very good idea for Apple from a technical standpoint, since IBM knows how to build very fast PowerPC chips. Only one problem with this: Motorola has a contract with Apple to be the exclusive supplier of CPUs (with an exception that allows Apple to temporarily go to other manafacturers in case Motorola has supply issues).
Congratulations. Due to your fumbling, you failed, and even worse, hurt future efforts by making the carriers of those messages look bad by association.
The reason why people don't usually get a say in what a corporation does is because they don't care, or their money is invested through intermediaries. If you want a say in a corporation's operations, don't invest through intermediaries. If you are a major shareholder, or can form an organization of shareholders that holds a major stake, you certainly do get a say in what the corporation's policies are! It's very simple, the corporation does what you want it to, or you put directors in charge who will do what you want them to. Of course, this is a simplification, without getting into the differences between voting and non-voting shares, etc... but still the reason these corporations get away with everything is because, in the end, it's the bottom line that counts. Most people don't invest in companies they disagree with (instead of taking the logical solution, investing, and then using that investment to try to change the behaviour - of course if you do that you start hurting your own bottom line since you'll probably end up decreasing the corporation's profits, which get payed out to you and the other shareholders).
Very correct, Orwell WAS a socialist and a communist.
Then he saw the system at work in Soviet Russia, and changed his mind. Animal Farm is very much a commentary on the rise of the communism and its eventual corruption in Soviet Russia.
Remember, the truely intelligent are smart enough to know when they are wrong.