Agree with 1984, Brave New World, The Road, and many others above, but no one has mentioned Stanislaw Lem. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is pretty dark. The Futurological Congress has a veneer of psychedelic humor in it, but the underlying sentiment is quite grim. Then there's Solaris, so grim they had to film it twice.
This is certainly true, but only half the issue. Wikipedia is justly distrusted because, at any given moment, an article may have been subtly vandalized, astroturfed, tilted in tone, or just plain wrong. Far more important is the ludicrous idea, central to Wikipedia, that any given editor is just as likely to be accurate as any other, without regard to knowledge or experience, that any editor may edit anonymously, and that any system for establishing identity, real-world reputation and (crucially) expertise (even if it is only expertise in interpreting the citations) is anathema.
This gets you teen-agers arguing with Math PhDs about math, and zealots and partisans of all stripes arguing with everyone. Expertise is central to the concept of an encyclopedia, and Wikipedia and its community thoroughly reject and repudiate it. This, indeed, may be well-adapted to some things, but writing a true encyclopedia is not one of them. As someone once said, on Wikipedia, twenty teenage idiots and one expert are indistinguishable from twenty-one teenage idiots.
Wikipedia is a big old pile of trivia, opinion, gossip, libel, and misinformation. That it is sometimes correct is happenstance, not planning.
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. You haven't taken the first and most essential step in analyzing your problem: measuring it. Is your problem caused by network failure? By power? By software failure? Hardware? If hardware, by server hardware, disks, or something else?
If software, by OS, database, or application software? All of these have different solutions. Going to the cloud won't solve a network failure, it will make things worse. Going to the cloud may improve persistent hardware failures. but the MTBF of most decent hardware is pretty good, so are you sure you have clean power and a good (cool, clean) environment?
If your software or system is crashing, then that's its own problem.
Winnow your photos at least once a year, selecting the best subset, and print two copies of a book of them using http://blurb.com/ or a similar service. Send one of the books to a trusted relative. Make two or three copies of the underlying digital files on some kind of archival media. Store them separately from the book. Make a secure digital backup of all your original files as well as uploading them to two or more online services.
This strategy will protect you to varying degrees against fire, natural disaster, failure of digital media, bankruptcy of online services, bit rot, password loss, and just about everything else, but it's a lot of work.
I make these "yearbooks" once a year, plus a book for significant birthdays and anniversaries, major travel, and other big events. I store on two photo services and an online backup service, and I have local online copies on RAID, a backup on another RAID, and a third RAID at a separate physical location, updated monthly via rsync.
Ward Cunningham's first prototypes of the Wiki concept were built using a hypercard stack.
Hypercard didn't adapt to the network (and most specifically the Web), and was replaced, not by something better, but by something different.
Everyone knows that "One" bits are heavier than "Zero" bits. Now Amazon will have to tell us what the ratio of '1' bits to '0' bits is for any given e-book.
The "wilderness of New Jersey"? I mean, the Pine Barrens are unpopulated and all, but I'm not sure I'd call it "wilderness". Are they going to build it entirely out of gangster bones and toxic waste?
While others have mentioned both the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry, it should be noted that they are co-located with the (also excellent) Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium. Not far away is the world-class Art Institute of Chicago. Much of this is the legacy of the 1893 Chicago World Fair, and in terms of density of world-class museums, is more bang for your time and dollar that you'll get anywhere outside of Washington DC (Smithsonian, etc) and perhaps London. You can get a multi-day pass to all of these museums for anywhere from about $70/person, and it is well worth it.
Thanks to the OP and Slashdot for this. As an avid reader of Lem since the 1970s, I remember The Futurological Congress well, and if I were at home, I'd grab my copy and re-read it. For those who need a gentler introduction to Lem, try Tales of Pirx the Pilot and its sequels. However, for pure, all-out trippyness, try Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.
And don't forget that Lem wrote Solaris, an SF classic, despite the two attempts at movies from it.
Saying "given software that can parallelize across many such cores" is the same as saying "then a miracle occurs".
Unless you are interested in a pretty small class of problems, the inherent parallelism of most applications continues to be somewhere in the range 2.1 to 2.5 (i.e., you can speed them up by a little over 2x with the addition of more processors). Thus, in most real-world applications, most of those cores, or vector units, or any other "supercomputer" features will go unused.
If anyone here observes a quad-core chip running any particular load anywhere close to 4x the speed of a single core should write a paper about it, because this has been the holy grail of parallel computing for going on 40 years now.
That Intel thinks this is a solution is sadly typical -- the problem is a software one, not a hardware problem, and they do not know how to solve it.
I'm the original poster. I spoke to a lawyer, and he told me that in my state this type of contract would hold and that the employer can punish employees in any way for not signing. So, I'm thinking I just need to find a better employer.
That is most likely the correct answer, though there is one other possibility: find a better lawyer. While you are probably an "at will" employee (i.e. can be fired for any or no reason), requiring a contract for no other compensation that to continue your employment reduces the level of free will in your execution of such a contact, and may in fact void it. Consider: if someone puts a gun to your head (or your dog's head) and says, "sign this", it is not a binding contact. If your employment is at risk, while it is not a matter or life or death, it nonetheless reduces your ability to freely enter into an agreement.
A better lawyer would go through this with you. But as before, the bottom line may be the same -- you may wish to just stop working for these scumbags.
New York Times article here (reg req'd, etc).
BERLIN, Sept. 3 -- Amid intense lobbying, Microsoft is expected to squeak out a victory this week to have its open document format, Office Open XML, recognized as an international standard, people tracking the vote said Monday....
"After what basically has amounted to unprecedented lobbying, I think that Microsoft's standard is going to get the necessary amount of support," said Pieter Hintjens, president of Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a Brussels group that led the opposition. Rage, rage, at the dying of the light.
Your note is correct, to a point, but contains a serious error as well.
NSP was in part an attempt to forestall the rise of what are now known as GPUs. It is a matter of opinion whether, if it had been allowed to come to market, it would have "knecapped" the gaming industry. Personally, I doubt that, and I think that GPUs would have developed along a very similar trajectory, as the CPU doesn't do well many of the things the GPU grew to do.
But with respect, your final statement is flat wrong. "Intel backed down because a lot of people, not just Microsoft, screamed bloody murder." This is just plain wrong. Few people knew anything about NSP before it was killed, and fewer still complained about it. A number of game developers were excited about it, because it would have allowed them to more easily bypass parts of Windows that got in their way.
Recall that this was the effet of Intel's NSP (the ill-named "Native Signal Processing"), a real-time multui-thread scheduler inserted at the device-driver level of Windows. Combined with something called VDI (Video Direct Interface), which allowed applications to bypass the Microsoft GDI graphics layer in certain ways, this allowed multiple video, graphics, and audio streams, mixed and synchronized, on circa-1993 computers, something largely not even possible today. While NSP was intended primarily for media streams, its technology was broadly applicable to more responsive and vivid interfaces.
The result was Microsoft's threat to cut off Intel from future Windows development and specifically to withhold 64-bit support from Itanium, to more publically support AMD (which they did, for a while), and to threaten any OEMs using the code with withdrawal of Microsoft software support. Much of this was detailed in the Microsoft anti-trust trial and the accompanying discovery documents. Under this pressure, Intel abandoned the software, transferring VDI to Microsoft (it formed the core of what was later called DirectX), and outright killing NSP. Andy Grove admitted to Fortune magazine "We caved." (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/msdoj/transcript/sum maries2.html)
This is not to suggest that this was the best or only way to do this, or that others haven't done it and done it well. But despite the best efforts of Linus and friends, Windows remains the dominant desktop OS, and Windows continues to be built on a base of 1970s-era operating system principles. Microsoft has, and continues to, build substantial barriers to anyone trying to substantially modify the behaviour of Windows at the HAL/device layer. Whether VMWare and equivalent virtualization technologies are finally a camel's nose under the tent edge remains to be seen. But as long as Windows remains the dominant desktop OS, you can expect the desktop to lag 10-15 years (at best) behind the state of the art in OS, GUI, and real-time developments.
These devices cost $27k for a "base" system, and $4k per player. On the one hand, I suppose this means they had enough money to litigate the issue. On the other hand, one can only hope that some competition brings the price point down.
http://www.olive.us/ or http://www.hifidelio.com/. Not cheap: US$1100 for 160Gb, but is audiophile quality, works perfectly, runs on hackable Linux (see http://www.hifidelio-user.de/ (regrettably mostly in German), had both wireless and wired networking, but works completely standalone if desired. I have two.
In my opinion, vandalism is not the primary Wikipedia problem. Yes, it is embarrassing, but ultimately only a secondary symptom of the central problem: when you have an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit", anyone does edit it. The clear observtion (can't remember who said this first) is that twenty teenage idiots do not collaboratively make an expert. The perhaps more important corollary is that twenty teenage idiots plus one expert are indistinguishable from twenty-one idiots.
Larry Sanger has acutely commented on Wikipedia's anti-elitism and the way they have run experts off the system. Experts don't have the time or energy to debate fundamental points of well-understood scholarships with game-playing trolls. Further, even when they aren't teenagers, Wikipedia has become the home of everyone who wants history and scholarship to read the way they like it rather than representing some academic consensus. As a result we have politicians trying to rewrite their personal biographies (or those of their opponents), partisans on each side of the world's conflicts burnishing their allies and undermining their opponents (Israel/Palestine, Turkey/Armenia, US/everyone else), and devotees of everything from Microsoft Vista to Nintendo to PETA skillfully expunging objective truth from their deifications of the chosen object of worship.
So doling out karma to 100,000 teenage idiots is not going to solve Wikipedia's problem. In order to save Wikipedia, we need to destroy it -- it needs to be edited by more experts and fewer "normal people".
This is, as others have observed, long overdue. When Intel could maintain a dominant market share, and thus pricing power over its competition (primarily AMD), it could afford to be (or try to be) a broad-based technology company: i.e. one that invested heavily in new technologies and speculative businesses that were not necessarily on a direct path to their primary (semiconductor) products. The largest (and most wasteful) of these investments happened during Craig Barrett's regime as CEO, and it was these that were most desperate and ill-advised. These included Intel's $500m+ investment in trying to be a hosting service, its attempts to be a low-cost end-user peripheral maker, a toy manufacturer, a maker of LCoS-TV chips, and numerous other misbegotten adventures far from its core competence.
What Intel is at heart, and will be for some time, is the world's best high-volume manufacturer of semiconductors, something that requires a far, far lower load of white-collar workers than being a broad-ranging technology company. Intel will continue to be a great producer of an important product, but only in the sense that (e.g.) US Steel was once a great producer of an important product. Intel is on the path to irrelevance as a technology force. This is why its P/E is 17x and not, for example, Google's 55x or even Microsoft's 21x. Look for it to trend upward in the short-term, but in the longer term settle toward US Steel's 8x.
Also note that recent management changes have elevated Sean Maloney into an heir-apparent position. This signals the fin de siecle, completing the transition from an engineer/scientist leader (Andy Grove) through a manufacturing guru (Barrett), to a bean-counter (Otellini), ending with a salesman (Maloney). How the mighty have fallen.
I don't normally reply to ACs, and this is old news, but for the record, you don't know what you're talking about.
To your comment "Sorry, bub. AMD isn't the competition", from the 7/21/06 New York Times:
The Intel Corporation, the semiconductor maker, said yesterday that it had shuffled its management team as part of an effort to speed up decision making and win back market share from Advanced Micro Devices.
Your other commentary is similarly ill-advised.
Congratulations for getting a job as a junior engineer at a formerly great company, but don't plan on retiring on your stock options.
This is, as other have observed, long overdue. While Intel could maintain a dominant market share, and thus pricing power over its competition (primarily AMD), it could afford to (attempt to) be a broad-based technology company: i.e. one that invested heavily in new technologies and speculative businesses that were not necessarily on a direct path to their primary (semiconductor) products. The largest (and most wasteful) of these investments happened during Craig Barrett's regime as CEO, and it was these that were most desperate and ill-advised. These included Intel's $500m+ investment in trying to be a hosting service, its attempts to be a toy manufacturer, a maker of DLP-TV chips, and numerous other misbegotten adventures.
What Intel is at heart, and will be for some time, is the world's best manufacturer of semiconductors. And this requires a far, far lower load of white-collar workers than a putative technology company. Intel can be a great producer of an important product, but only in the sense that (e.g.) US Steel was once a great producer of an important product. Intel is on the path to irrelevance as a technology force.
This reminds me of a comment I heard early in my career at Intel, when the 387 (the original match co-processor, anyone remember those?) went on sale:
"We make higher margins on those than the US Treasury does making dollar bills".
The margin on today's chips is nowhere near that high.
Seriously, though the comments about R&D and marketing costs are on track, but leave out an important one: for each new generation of chip, one or more entire fabs (manufacturing lines) need to be built. Lately this costs $2bn (yes, billion) or more. When the next chip process comes along, the whole plant is essentially thrown away (yes, in reality it gets used for down-rev chips, but the lifetime isn't long). The difference between the actual capital deprecitation of these and the real cost/lifetime is another "hidden" component of chip cost. This applies pretty much equally to anyone making cutting-edge chips, including AMD.
One of the reasons AMD stayed so far behind for so long was that its chips, generally a generation behind Intel (in the 1990s) didn't generate enough profit to build these truly leading-edge fabs. The "treadmill" as it was known at Intel, ran too fast for them to catch up. When the market hiccuped in 2000, things changed. Before that was a truly fine time to own lots of Intel stock options.
I was at Reed not long after Jobs (I remember seeing one of his card decks in the computer room). Reed tuition then was about $3k/yr -- not cheap, but within the range for my middle-class family, even without financial aid, which I got some of as well.
I doubt that Jobs dropped out because of financial pressure -- I suspect i had more to do with the rigor and conservativism of Reed's curriculum. The place is socially very liberal, but the pedagogy is extremely old-fashioned, and was even more so in the 1970s. At the time, Reed's drop-out rate was near 70%.
Reed now costs over $40k/yr all-in, but most of the students there have family incomes below $60k/yr.
I'm not casting stones -- I dropped out of Reed too, but not for financial reasons. Most people give financial reasons when they really mean something else.
But they let Richard Stallman [geocities.com] have an office to just live out the rest of his life in on the student's dime, doing and producing absolutely nothing for society or for the University.
Actually, Stallman's office was in the MIT AI Lab, not the Media Lab. Big difference. Don't know where it is now, but it has never been in the Media Lab.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree with 1984, Brave New World, The Road, and many others above, but no one has mentioned Stanislaw Lem. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is pretty dark. The Futurological Congress has a veneer of psychedelic humor in it, but the underlying sentiment is quite grim. Then there's Solaris, so grim they had to film it twice.
This is certainly true, but only half the issue. Wikipedia is justly distrusted because, at any given moment, an article may have been subtly vandalized, astroturfed, tilted in tone, or just plain wrong. Far more important is the ludicrous idea, central to Wikipedia, that any given editor is just as likely to be accurate as any other, without regard to knowledge or experience, that any editor may edit anonymously, and that any system for establishing identity, real-world reputation and (crucially) expertise (even if it is only expertise in interpreting the citations) is anathema.
This gets you teen-agers arguing with Math PhDs about math, and zealots and partisans of all stripes arguing with everyone. Expertise is central to the concept of an encyclopedia, and Wikipedia and its community thoroughly reject and repudiate it. This, indeed, may be well-adapted to some things, but writing a true encyclopedia is not one of them. As someone once said, on Wikipedia, twenty teenage idiots and one expert are indistinguishable from twenty-one teenage idiots.
Wikipedia is a big old pile of trivia, opinion, gossip, libel, and misinformation. That it is sometimes correct is happenstance, not planning.
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. You haven't taken the first and most essential step in analyzing your problem: measuring it. Is your problem caused by network failure? By power? By software failure? Hardware? If hardware, by server hardware, disks, or something else?
If software, by OS, database, or application software? All of these have different solutions. Going to the cloud won't solve a network failure, it will make things worse. Going to the cloud may improve persistent hardware failures. but the MTBF of most decent hardware is pretty good, so are you sure you have clean power and a good (cool, clean) environment?
If your software or system is crashing, then that's its own problem.
This strategy will protect you to varying degrees against fire, natural disaster, failure of digital media, bankruptcy of online services, bit rot, password loss, and just about everything else, but it's a lot of work.
I make these "yearbooks" once a year, plus a book for significant birthdays and anniversaries, major travel, and other big events. I store on two photo services and an online backup service, and I have local online copies on RAID, a backup on another RAID, and a third RAID at a separate physical location, updated monthly via rsync.
Ward Cunningham's first prototypes of the Wiki concept were built using a hypercard stack. Hypercard didn't adapt to the network (and most specifically the Web), and was replaced, not by something better, but by something different.
Everyone knows that "One" bits are heavier than "Zero" bits. Now Amazon will have to tell us what the ratio of '1' bits to '0' bits is for any given e-book.
The "wilderness of New Jersey"? I mean, the Pine Barrens are unpopulated and all, but I'm not sure I'd call it "wilderness". Are they going to build it entirely out of gangster bones and toxic waste?
While others have mentioned both the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry, it should be noted that they are co-located with the (also excellent) Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium. Not far away is the world-class Art Institute of Chicago. Much of this is the legacy of the 1893 Chicago World Fair, and in terms of density of world-class museums, is more bang for your time and dollar that you'll get anywhere outside of Washington DC (Smithsonian, etc) and perhaps London. You can get a multi-day pass to all of these museums for anywhere from about $70/person, and it is well worth it.
Thanks to the OP and Slashdot for this. As an avid reader of Lem since the 1970s, I remember The Futurological Congress well, and if I were at home, I'd grab my copy and re-read it. For those who need a gentler introduction to Lem, try Tales of Pirx the Pilot and its sequels. However, for pure, all-out trippyness, try Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. And don't forget that Lem wrote Solaris, an SF classic, despite the two attempts at movies from it.
Unless you are interested in a pretty small class of problems, the inherent parallelism of most applications continues to be somewhere in the range 2.1 to 2.5 (i.e., you can speed them up by a little over 2x with the addition of more processors). Thus, in most real-world applications, most of those cores, or vector units, or any other "supercomputer" features will go unused.
If anyone here observes a quad-core chip running any particular load anywhere close to 4x the speed of a single core should write a paper about it, because this has been the holy grail of parallel computing for going on 40 years now.
That Intel thinks this is a solution is sadly typical -- the problem is a software one, not a hardware problem, and they do not know how to solve it.
That is most likely the correct answer, though there is one other possibility: find a better lawyer. While you are probably an "at will" employee (i.e. can be fired for any or no reason), requiring a contract for no other compensation that to continue your employment reduces the level of free will in your execution of such a contact, and may in fact void it. Consider: if someone puts a gun to your head (or your dog's head) and says, "sign this", it is not a binding contact. If your employment is at risk, while it is not a matter or life or death, it nonetheless reduces your ability to freely enter into an agreement.
A better lawyer would go through this with you. But as before, the bottom line may be the same -- you may wish to just stop working for these scumbags.
Your note is correct, to a point, but contains a serious error as well.
NSP was in part an attempt to forestall the rise of what are now known as GPUs. It is a matter of opinion whether, if it had been allowed to come to market, it would have "knecapped" the gaming industry. Personally, I doubt that, and I think that GPUs would have developed along a very similar trajectory, as the CPU doesn't do well many of the things the GPU grew to do.
But with respect, your final statement is flat wrong. "Intel backed down because a lot of people, not just Microsoft, screamed bloody murder." This is just plain wrong. Few people knew anything about NSP before it was killed, and fewer still complained about it. A number of game developers were excited about it, because it would have allowed them to more easily bypass parts of Windows that got in their way.
Recall that this was the effet of Intel's NSP (the ill-named "Native Signal Processing"), a real-time multui-thread scheduler inserted at the device-driver level of Windows. Combined with something called VDI (Video Direct Interface), which allowed applications to bypass the Microsoft GDI graphics layer in certain ways, this allowed multiple video, graphics, and audio streams, mixed and synchronized, on circa-1993 computers, something largely not even possible today. While NSP was intended primarily for media streams, its technology was broadly applicable to more responsive and vivid interfaces. The result was Microsoft's threat to cut off Intel from future Windows development and specifically to withhold 64-bit support from Itanium, to more publically support AMD (which they did, for a while), and to threaten any OEMs using the code with withdrawal of Microsoft software support. Much of this was detailed in the Microsoft anti-trust trial and the accompanying discovery documents. Under this pressure, Intel abandoned the software, transferring VDI to Microsoft (it formed the core of what was later called DirectX), and outright killing NSP. Andy Grove admitted to Fortune magazine "We caved." (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/msdoj/transcript/sum maries2.html)
This is not to suggest that this was the best or only way to do this, or that others haven't done it and done it well. But despite the best efforts of Linus and friends, Windows remains the dominant desktop OS, and Windows continues to be built on a base of 1970s-era operating system principles. Microsoft has, and continues to, build substantial barriers to anyone trying to substantially modify the behaviour of Windows at the HAL/device layer. Whether VMWare and equivalent virtualization technologies are finally a camel's nose under the tent edge remains to be seen. But as long as Windows remains the dominant desktop OS, you can expect the desktop to lag 10-15 years (at best) behind the state of the art in OS, GUI, and real-time developments.
These devices cost $27k for a "base" system, and $4k per player. On the one hand, I suppose this means they had enough money to litigate the issue. On the other hand, one can only hope that some competition brings the price point down.
I am willing to host the documents and bear any legal risk (of which I do not believe there is any). Contact me through the email here.
http://www.olive.us/ or http://www.hifidelio.com/. Not cheap: US$1100 for 160Gb, but is audiophile quality, works perfectly, runs on hackable Linux (see http://www.hifidelio-user.de/ (regrettably mostly in German), had both wireless and wired networking, but works completely standalone if desired. I have two.
Larry Sanger has acutely commented on Wikipedia's anti-elitism and the way they have run experts off the system. Experts don't have the time or energy to debate fundamental points of well-understood scholarships with game-playing trolls. Further, even when they aren't teenagers, Wikipedia has become the home of everyone who wants history and scholarship to read the way they like it rather than representing some academic consensus. As a result we have politicians trying to rewrite their personal biographies (or those of their opponents), partisans on each side of the world's conflicts burnishing their allies and undermining their opponents (Israel/Palestine, Turkey/Armenia, US/everyone else), and devotees of everything from Microsoft Vista to Nintendo to PETA skillfully expunging objective truth from their deifications of the chosen object of worship.
So doling out karma to 100,000 teenage idiots is not going to solve Wikipedia's problem. In order to save Wikipedia, we need to destroy it -- it needs to be edited by more experts and fewer "normal people".
What Intel is at heart, and will be for some time, is the world's best high-volume manufacturer of semiconductors, something that requires a far, far lower load of white-collar workers than being a broad-ranging technology company. Intel will continue to be a great producer of an important product, but only in the sense that (e.g.) US Steel was once a great producer of an important product. Intel is on the path to irrelevance as a technology force. This is why its P/E is 17x and not, for example, Google's 55x or even Microsoft's 21x. Look for it to trend upward in the short-term, but in the longer term settle toward US Steel's 8x.
Also note that recent management changes have elevated Sean Maloney into an heir-apparent position. This signals the fin de siecle, completing the transition from an engineer/scientist leader (Andy Grove) through a manufacturing guru (Barrett), to a bean-counter (Otellini), ending with a salesman (Maloney). How the mighty have fallen.
To your comment "Sorry, bub. AMD isn't the competition", from the 7/21/06 New York Times:
Your other commentary is similarly ill-advised.Congratulations for getting a job as a junior engineer at a formerly great company, but don't plan on retiring on your stock options.
What Intel is at heart, and will be for some time, is the world's best manufacturer of semiconductors. And this requires a far, far lower load of white-collar workers than a putative technology company. Intel can be a great producer of an important product, but only in the sense that (e.g.) US Steel was once a great producer of an important product. Intel is on the path to irrelevance as a technology force.
Mark was a friend and is missed. One of his favorite books on the subject was P.K. Dick's Ubiq. Hence the name of the site. Check it out. -- gnet
"We make higher margins on those than the US Treasury does making dollar bills".
The margin on today's chips is nowhere near that high.
Seriously, though the comments about R&D and marketing costs are on track, but leave out an important one: for each new generation of chip, one or more entire fabs (manufacturing lines) need to be built. Lately this costs $2bn (yes, billion) or more. When the next chip process comes along, the whole plant is essentially thrown away (yes, in reality it gets used for down-rev chips, but the lifetime isn't long). The difference between the actual capital deprecitation of these and the real cost/lifetime is another "hidden" component of chip cost. This applies pretty much equally to anyone making cutting-edge chips, including AMD.
One of the reasons AMD stayed so far behind for so long was that its chips, generally a generation behind Intel (in the 1990s) didn't generate enough profit to build these truly leading-edge fabs. The "treadmill" as it was known at Intel, ran too fast for them to catch up. When the market hiccuped in 2000, things changed. Before that was a truly fine time to own lots of Intel stock options.
-- gnet
I doubt that Jobs dropped out because of financial pressure -- I suspect i had more to do with the rigor and conservativism of Reed's curriculum. The place is socially very liberal, but the pedagogy is extremely old-fashioned, and was even more so in the 1970s. At the time, Reed's drop-out rate was near 70%.
Reed now costs over $40k/yr all-in, but most of the students there have family incomes below $60k/yr.
I'm not casting stones -- I dropped out of Reed too, but not for financial reasons. Most people give financial reasons when they really mean something else.