Huh, how could Inhell have been one of the "first" investors in Be. The original BeOS ran on the PowerPC, and the first non BeBox versions ran on PPC Macs. The x86 port was much later in the game. Now they could have invested later, but definitely not "one of the first".
Yes, I saw the VAX mini-bar as well. I must admit that I personally hate to see stuff like this happening. I think the old stuff should be left alone since there are plenty of people out there who would love to have them and I think they're worth "more" (not in monetary terms) used as is, vs being mod'ed into whatever, no matter how "cool".
That's why he shoulda used the "case" from an Onyx, now THAT would be an impressive site. You'd even have plenty of room to store you twinkies and Jolt.
I think I'll go hunt down a Cray X-MP, gut it, and stick my 486 mobo into it. With that things cooling capacity, I should be able to overlock that puppy up to a gig or so.
Re:Reminds me of the time......
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
Sigh... maybe I'm just old, but I think I'd have a hard time having the audacity of doing the same thing today...
That and they might get more suspicious when you bring in a crate full of floppies to format and copy WinXP/RedHat onto.
BTW, I remember the Corona, another Compaq like luggable if my ever waning memory serves. My god, ethernet in 1983, those cards were over $1000 apiece back then weren't they?
Re:Taking that idea one step further...
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
Heck, it'd be simple enough to create a cron job to automagically update a particular machine using say, ftp. It could also make sure that there is always a reasonable amount of disk space left so as to not arouse suspicion.
Of course it would also be convenient to have the iPod be able to erase everything on it's hd with some button combo, that way if you did get busted, you could quickly zap whatever you copied. Better yet, have all the files you're "sharing" encrypted, so even if stuff is found on either the CUSA computers or your iPod, it won't mean jack to them anyway (assuming you chose non obvious file names of course).
Who needs Napster/et al anyway?
This is all dependant on the fact that their pcs are actuallly hooked up to their internal lan, which I kinda doubt. But one can surely dream can't they?
Re:Total misue of the word "Thief"
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
but if you steal the Ferrari then the owner is now missing a car
I knew that that statement would be misunderstood. It was addressing his specific statement:
He's a kid, he never would have bought Office anyways
The point being that the fact that he would not have bought the product anyway is not a reason why the action is "ok". I realize what his point was. We're starting to tread into the very sticky ground of exactly how "harmful" software piracy is, an area best avoided me thinks.
Question for thought:
If you found out that someone was sneaking into your house and watching your tv and checking out your personal belongings, not taking anything, not eating anything and maybe even being kind enough to put your tv back on the channel you had it on. Would you consider this a crime? Would you be upset? No victim here, right? Or is there?
Re:Total misue of the word "Thief"
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
So it's only a crime to take "real" goods. If I steal a Ferrari, it should be ok because "I never would have bought a Ferrari anyways". All software falls into your "still have the same amount of stock s they did 5 minutes ago" (not talking packages here, after all, you don't get busted for stealing packaging, it's the software contained therein that everyone raises the fuss about). The act is illegal, like it or not, and no amount of "well no one was hurt" is going to make it any less so.
Using CUSA, BestBuy, et al as offline storage?
on
iWarez
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· Score: 2, Interesting
How's this for a scenerio. Rip a dvd. Copy it to your iPod, trot over to CUSA, UPLOAD the file to their G4, tell your friends which computer it's on, share away. This could be done with anything of course, not just a DVD. While CUSA is busy password protecting M$ Offal, "enterprising" youths are taking advantage of plenty of storage to create some easy and quick offline storage. Why wait hours for the big stuff to download even over a cable modem. Just drag and drop whatever files you want. It'd be easy enough to hide the files/directories on the Macs, and since their demo machines, they're likely to have tons of space free. Bit more dangerious of course, but oh so convenient.
Plus, steel is rather heavy, although a rusted out case might look pretty cool
Hey, how about neo-industrial art cases made from rusted out stuff from a junkyard. You could have a case that's cut from the gas tank of a 82 Nova. Or how about mounting that dual proccy Athlon inside the exposed radiator of a VW Bus? Or mounted in an old upright freezer, plenty of cooling there.
Or how's this, mount the guts under your office chair, and put dual lcd displays on each arm with a split chorded keyboard, now THAT would be sweeeet. Better provide plenty of cooling though, or put some insulation in your jeans, or just sit around reading/. all day and build up your own insulation.
because the entire industry is based on coercing consumers into buying the newest product
Only one spreading FUD here is you. Intel started on this whole IA64 architecture route because in the mid 90's they were concerned that the clock rates (and performance) for the RISC chips (mainly Alpha) were advancing at a rate faster than they could keep up with the x86 ISA. So they decided to swallow up PA-RISC from HP and use parts of it and other VLIW technology to come up with a chip to carry them forward "after x86 maxed out". Well fast forward to now and there are P4's running at >2GHz and x86 looks like it has plenty of steam. So what is Intel to do, chuck the multi billion dollars spent working on the chip? Well no, you plug away at trying to increase the chips performance while you try to convince people to move up and hopefully things start looking rosier as things start coming together (good 64bit compilers, more ported apps, decent user base, etc).
His argument above holds even less water when you consider that Intel isn't even trying to act like this chip is for the desktop market. Server folks like to see numbers, and if you can't produce, adios.
People have been making the same claim since we moved from 16 to 32 bit. "We don't need 32bit, it's just Intels way to milking us". Yeah, right.
As a side note, does Itanic remind anyone of another breakthrough processor from Intel that costs boat loads and completely flopped?
And just because the group as a whole thinks it is does not make it so either.
Well, yes and no. Since we're talking about something that has no absolute value (some religous folks would disagree with this) anyway, by definition the groups opinion does make it so.
By your logic, it seems that gay people should defer to the majority. Nope, never said anything about deferring anything. Again, we're talking a concept that has no absolute rightness or wrongness, they would not have to defer, but they do have to understand the situation that they live in and behave accordingly. Now don't contrue that last statement as having to "bow" to the system. Rather, if you are living in an environment that is openly hostile towards you, you have to be smart about how you choose to interact with that environment. Be careful about your statement about "Right now in the US...". Homosexuality, while viewed dimly by many, is at a minimum tolerated by most.
Child pornography should be stopped not because the images are distasteful (I'm sure the consumers of it would disagree), but because one must harm a child to produce it
Right, but that's the point isn't it. It is "distasteful" because it is harmful, that's the whole crux of the matter. The majority of "morals" derive from protecting individuals and groups. Now of course not all morals are this way, but most of them are. Your statement is actually redundant. Murder is "distasteful" because it harms. Robbery is "distasteful" because it harms. Now some would say that homosexuality is harmful as well. As a matter of fact, those who are most vehementaly against it are the ones who think that it actually produces harm (which of course is the crux of pro/anti homosexuality arguments).
The idea that outlawing the product will stop it's production is laughable
An extremist argument. It's an obvious statement that you can't "elminate harmful things". And anyone who says that outlawing say drugs will somehow remove drug use is obviously delusional. However, would you rather live in a society where murder is legal or illegal. Making it illegal, obviously, does not prevent it from happening, but it does help to provide a baseline for most of the members of society to follow.
If a person spews extreme rhetoric, not many will listen thereby limiting the effect that rhetoric will have.
Tell that to the Jews after WWI. Tell that to the people working in the WTC on 11 Sept. Tell that to anyone who has been a victim of gang violence.
Basically, I am an adult and I don't need anyone telling me what ideas or images or whatever are harmful to me.
A grossly simplified view don't you think? Like it or not, many people suffer from the herd mentality. Maybe not people who hang out on/., but the fact that the drones in the Windoze world exist makes this fact obvious. Many people do need a little help to remind them that certain things are harmful. Some drugs are addtictive, chemically, if you are not warned, how can you be expected to successfully avoid becoming dependant. Remember, we are products of our environment, and we know what we are taught (not just in school, but taught by life). And no one I know is so uber intelligent that they know everything that can be harmful to them.
I hate these types of conversations on this type of medium. It's a wonderfully interesting topic to discuss, but it works better for me to be more interactive in discussion. There is so much I'm leaving out to keep things as succent as possible. Anyway, I don't think that we're too far off from each other, more a issue of understanding definitions and clarifications of assumptions.
You need to open your mind and surf the web a little more. Pornography simply the act of pro creation by humans? I guess you only visit playboy.com. Fact is that "porn" includes things like bestiality, pedophilia, etc. Not just Mike and Mary doing the nasty in their bedroom.
"speech that makes me uncomfortable"? Uhh, ok. I guess that includes you finding that type of thinking "disturbing", by your definition the concept of "hate speech" is to you "hate speech".
You seem to like looking at life simply, perhaps a bit too simply. This often comes from wanting to view things from an idividual perspective. Fact is is that we live in societies, groups of peoples with widely differing interests and motivations, some which are not compatable. In order for these groups of people to coexist happily, concessions are made on ones personal freedoms to attain this group, uh, "harmony". Just as/. is not a free for all, and most are happier for it. "Pornography" and "hate speech" DO EXIST. Just as "inappropriate posts" exist here. Just because YOU don't think a particular thing is porn, doesn't mean that the group as a whole does not think it is.
So, if you "find it disturbing", then perhaps you should "grow up". Perhaps it's your personality that is stunted"?
-- "It's obvious that you're intolerant of my intolerance." - Dogbert to Dilbert --
Uhh, they lost $18.5mil just in the 4th quarter alone. What do you think they need the money for?
Ya know, seems like if the banks/cc companies got off their butts, they could easily provide a service just like PP and give the consumers all the protection afforded by govt regs (HEY, I guess the govt is good for something after all;)
Let's not forget the the DD64 was only the latest non-cart media castoff from Nintendo. There is the most famous one of all, the Playstation. OK, the PSX as is was not designed to be used by the Big N, but they did comission Sony to produce a cd addon for the SNES, which they later dropped. Sony picked up the pieces and decided to roll their own, morphing the unit into what we now know as the original Playstation.
Everyone seems to have missed the second part of the question (much more fun to bitch I guess). I do believe that managing software is significantly different than managing other projects (say buildling an airplane or a bridge).
Much of that I believe comes from the ever expanding nature of software itself. Yes we've been programming for half a century now, but the nature and size of the software we write is significantly larger and more complex than anything anyone had to deal with back then (we can thank the hardware companies for that). Then throw in the fact that software is a constantly moving target and things get really screwy. The laws of physics aren't constantly being updated every three years, so airplane builders can focus on improvments within a known environment (for the most part). Could you imagine if the laws of aerodynamics changed every few years with a major paradigm shift every 6 or 7 years (Cooeficient of Drag 7.0 has given way to cd2002 and all your old formula no longer work, sorry).
However, one thing that I really don't hear people talk about insofar as software being a bitch to manage, is the simple fact that it's generally accepted that software will feature creep, be buggy, and that market pressures win out over software robustness. Even those who think that they are not falling prey to this mentality, do it subconsciously. It's the mentality of almost everyone who writes/designs/manages software. It's a iterative process, versions and revs are an integral part of this world.
Oh, and my job sucks. Not really the job, just been doing this for too long;)
Perhaps a port to Power/PowerPC? I know it's tough since IBM is a workstation competitor, but do they really compete? How many graphics workstation accounts have they lost to IBM I wonder, probably not too many. I guess they do compete for servers though.
What might really be cool is if IBM acquired SGI and made them their specialized graphics workstation division. This way SGI can stop spinning cycles developing servers and focus on high powered graphics. The thought of an Onyx running on a POWER4 cpu is quite intoxicating.
MIPS would survive on its core (fogive the pun) business of supplying embedded systems (including PS1/PS2/PSn).
You are confused, the IA64 is NOT just a RISC chip! It is a VLIW (very long instruction word) chip. Multiple instructions are packaged together. These instructions are executed at the same time, so they MUST be able to run concurrently. The compiler is in charge of making sure these instruction "packets" can indeed run in parallel, making the compilers a total bitch to write.
"A car with four wheels, hell we already have cars with four wheels, why do we need another?"
Keep in mind that Apple switched two disparate cpu families and that all the emulation was done in software. Itanic was designed to emulate the x86 in hardware! So while it is interesting to compare, we're talking two fundamentally different situations here.
The key point in your last statement is the part about the "consumer market". Obviously Intel is focusing soley on server/advanced workstation market since they can recoup costs by initially charging more (a lot more) and you have a smaller set of apps to rebuild in 64bit. With the P4 chugging along, I don't think that they are killing themselves trying to get Itanic on every desktop right yet.
PLUS, if anyone remembers, the 386 was actually _slower_ than the equivlent clock speed 286 for running 16bit real mode code. You just couldn't buy any 286's mainstream above 12Mhz when the 386 came out at 16Mhz, so the clock bump masked the slight decrease in performance (the price you pay for doing things "right"). It wasn't until you could buy 16 and 20Mhz 286's (by then no one cared) that this fact became evident.
Re:That link to Fatbrain always confuses me...
on
Dot.Con
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· Score: 1
generate profit
profit is the key word here. Remember, one shows a profit when ones revenue exceeds ones expenses. The simple act of generating revenue doesn't sully an organization that purports (either explicitly as in non-profits or implicitly by having an ORG TLD) to be not for profit. Organizations have expenses and generating revenues to help cover those expenses. I don't think this type of activity detracts from the original intent of the ORG TLD. Hell, just look at that banner ad at the top of the page.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel was one of the first investors in Be
Huh, how could Inhell have been one of the "first" investors in Be. The original BeOS ran on the PowerPC, and the first non BeBox versions ran on PPC Macs. The x86 port was much later in the game. Now they could have invested later, but definitely not "one of the first".
Enough sillyness, back on topic:
;)
I thought we _were_ on topic
Yes, I saw the VAX mini-bar as well. I must admit that I personally hate to see stuff like this happening. I think the old stuff should be left alone since there are plenty of people out there who would love to have them and I think they're worth "more" (not in monetary terms) used as is, vs being mod'ed into whatever, no matter how "cool".
That's why he shoulda used the "case" from an Onyx, now THAT would be an impressive site. You'd even have plenty of room to store you twinkies and Jolt.
I think I'll go hunt down a Cray X-MP, gut it, and stick my 486 mobo into it. With that things cooling capacity, I should be able to overlock that puppy up to a gig or so.
Sigh... maybe I'm just old, but I think I'd have a hard time having the audacity of doing the same thing today...
That and they might get more suspicious when you bring in a crate full of floppies to format and copy WinXP/RedHat onto.
BTW, I remember the Corona, another Compaq like luggable if my ever waning memory serves. My god, ethernet in 1983, those cards were over $1000 apiece back then weren't they?
Heck, it'd be simple enough to create a cron job to automagically update a particular machine using say, ftp. It could also make sure that there is always a reasonable amount of disk space left so as to not arouse suspicion.
Of course it would also be convenient to have the iPod be able to erase everything on it's hd with some button combo, that way if you did get busted, you could quickly zap whatever you copied. Better yet, have all the files you're "sharing" encrypted, so even if stuff is found on either the CUSA computers or your iPod, it won't mean jack to them anyway (assuming you chose non obvious file names of course).
Who needs Napster/et al anyway?
This is all dependant on the fact that their pcs are actuallly hooked up to their internal lan, which I kinda doubt. But one can surely dream can't they?
but if you steal the Ferrari then the owner is now missing a car
I knew that that statement would be misunderstood. It was addressing his specific statement:
He's a kid, he never would have bought Office anyways
The point being that the fact that he would not have bought the product anyway is not a reason why the action is "ok". I realize what his point was. We're starting to tread into the very sticky ground of exactly how "harmful" software piracy is, an area best avoided me thinks.
Question for thought:
If you found out that someone was sneaking into your house and watching your tv and checking out your personal belongings, not taking anything, not eating anything and maybe even being kind enough to put your tv back on the channel you had it on. Would you consider this a crime? Would you be upset? No victim here, right? Or is there?
So it's only a crime to take "real" goods. If I steal a Ferrari, it should be ok because "I never would have bought a Ferrari anyways". All software falls into your "still have the same amount of stock s they did 5 minutes ago" (not talking packages here, after all, you don't get busted for stealing packaging, it's the software contained therein that everyone raises the fuss about). The act is illegal, like it or not, and no amount of "well no one was hurt" is going to make it any less so.
How's this for a scenerio. Rip a dvd. Copy it to your iPod, trot over to CUSA, UPLOAD the file to their G4, tell your friends which computer it's on, share away. This could be done with anything of course, not just a DVD. While CUSA is busy password protecting M$ Offal, "enterprising" youths are taking advantage of plenty of storage to create some easy and quick offline storage. Why wait hours for the big stuff to download even over a cable modem. Just drag and drop whatever files you want. It'd be easy enough to hide the files/directories on the Macs, and since their demo machines, they're likely to have tons of space free. Bit more dangerious of course, but oh so convenient.
Plus, steel is rather heavy, although a rusted out case might look pretty cool
/. all day and build up your own insulation.
Hey, how about neo-industrial art cases made from rusted out stuff from a junkyard. You could have a case that's cut from the gas tank of a 82 Nova. Or how about mounting that dual proccy Athlon inside the exposed radiator of a VW Bus? Or mounted in an old upright freezer, plenty of cooling there.
Or how's this, mount the guts under your office chair, and put dual lcd displays on each arm with a split chorded keyboard, now THAT would be sweeeet. Better provide plenty of cooling though, or put some insulation in your jeans, or just sit around reading
because the entire industry is based on coercing consumers into buying the newest product
Only one spreading FUD here is you. Intel started on this whole IA64 architecture route because in the mid 90's they were concerned that the clock rates (and performance) for the RISC chips (mainly Alpha) were advancing at a rate faster than they could keep up with the x86 ISA. So they decided to swallow up PA-RISC from HP and use parts of it and other VLIW technology to come up with a chip to carry them forward "after x86 maxed out". Well fast forward to now and there are P4's running at >2GHz and x86 looks like it has plenty of steam. So what is Intel to do, chuck the multi billion dollars spent working on the chip? Well no, you plug away at trying to increase the chips performance while you try to convince people to move up and hopefully things start looking rosier as things start coming together (good 64bit compilers, more ported apps, decent user base, etc).
His argument above holds even less water when you consider that Intel isn't even trying to act like this chip is for the desktop market. Server folks like to see numbers, and if you can't produce, adios.
People have been making the same claim since we moved from 16 to 32 bit. "We don't need 32bit, it's just Intels way to milking us". Yeah, right.
As a side note, does Itanic remind anyone of another breakthrough processor from Intel that costs boat loads and completely flopped?
a version 1.0 operating system and exactly 0 applications for said operating system
Uh, wrong! All Win32 apps will run on 64bit XP. 64bit XP is a port of 32bit XP which is really just NT with a nose job, so wrong-o on all counts.
And just because the group as a whole thinks it is does not make it so either.
...". Homosexuality, while viewed dimly by many, is at a minimum tolerated by most.
/., but the fact that the drones in the Windoze world exist makes this fact obvious. Many people do need a little help to remind them that certain things are harmful. Some drugs are addtictive, chemically, if you are not warned, how can you be expected to successfully avoid becoming dependant. Remember, we are products of our environment, and we know what we are taught (not just in school, but taught by life). And no one I know is so uber intelligent that they know everything that can be harmful to them.
Well, yes and no. Since we're talking about something that has no absolute value (some religous folks would disagree with this) anyway, by definition the groups opinion does make it so.
By your logic, it seems that gay people should defer to the majority. Nope, never said anything about deferring anything. Again, we're talking a concept that has no absolute rightness or wrongness, they would not have to defer, but they do have to understand the situation that they live in and behave accordingly. Now don't contrue that last statement as having to "bow" to the system. Rather, if you are living in an environment that is openly hostile towards you, you have to be smart about how you choose to interact with that environment. Be careful about your statement about "Right now in the US
Child pornography should be stopped not because the images are distasteful (I'm sure the consumers of it would disagree), but because one must harm a child to produce it
Right, but that's the point isn't it. It is "distasteful" because it is harmful, that's the whole crux of the matter. The majority of "morals" derive from protecting individuals and groups. Now of course not all morals are this way, but most of them are. Your statement is actually redundant. Murder is "distasteful" because it harms. Robbery is "distasteful" because it harms. Now some would say that homosexuality is harmful as well. As a matter of fact, those who are most vehementaly against it are the ones who think that it actually produces harm (which of course is the crux of pro/anti homosexuality arguments).
The idea that outlawing the product will stop it's production is laughable
An extremist argument. It's an obvious statement that you can't "elminate harmful things". And anyone who says that outlawing say drugs will somehow remove drug use is obviously delusional. However, would you rather live in a society where murder is legal or illegal. Making it illegal, obviously, does not prevent it from happening, but it does help to provide a baseline for most of the members of society to follow.
If a person spews extreme rhetoric, not many will listen thereby limiting the effect that rhetoric will have.
Tell that to the Jews after WWI. Tell that to the people working in the WTC on 11 Sept. Tell that to anyone who has been a victim of gang violence.
Basically, I am an adult and I don't need anyone telling me what ideas or images or whatever are harmful to me.
A grossly simplified view don't you think? Like it or not, many people suffer from the herd mentality. Maybe not people who hang out on
I hate these types of conversations on this type of medium. It's a wonderfully interesting topic to discuss, but it works better for me to be more interactive in discussion. There is so much I'm leaving out to keep things as succent as possible. Anyway, I don't think that we're too far off from each other, more a issue of understanding definitions and clarifications of assumptions.
You need to open your mind and surf the web a little more. Pornography simply the act of pro creation by humans? I guess you only visit playboy.com. Fact is that "porn" includes things like bestiality, pedophilia, etc. Not just Mike and Mary doing the nasty in their bedroom.
/. is not a free for all, and most are happier for it. "Pornography" and "hate speech" DO EXIST. Just as "inappropriate posts" exist here. Just because YOU don't think a particular thing is porn, doesn't mean that the group as a whole does not think it is.
"speech that makes me uncomfortable"? Uhh, ok. I guess that includes you finding that type of thinking "disturbing", by your definition the concept of "hate speech" is to you "hate speech".
You seem to like looking at life simply, perhaps a bit too simply. This often comes from wanting to view things from an idividual perspective. Fact is is that we live in societies, groups of peoples with widely differing interests and motivations, some which are not compatable. In order for these groups of people to coexist happily, concessions are made on ones personal freedoms to attain this group, uh, "harmony". Just as
So, if you "find it disturbing", then perhaps you should "grow up". Perhaps it's your personality that is stunted"?
-- "It's obvious that you're intolerant of my intolerance." - Dogbert to Dilbert --
Uhh, they lost $18.5mil just in the 4th quarter alone. What do you think they need the money for?
;)
Ya know, seems like if the banks/cc companies got off their butts, they could easily provide a service just like PP and give the consumers all the protection afforded by govt regs (HEY, I guess the govt is good for something after all
Let's not forget the the DD64 was only the latest non-cart media castoff from Nintendo. There is the most famous one of all, the Playstation. OK, the PSX as is was not designed to be used by the Big N, but they did comission Sony to produce a cd addon for the SNES, which they later dropped. Sony picked up the pieces and decided to roll their own, morphing the unit into what we now know as the original Playstation.
Thanks Big N!
Sounds better than Nintega
Everyone seems to have missed the second part of the question (much more fun to bitch I guess). I do believe that managing software is significantly different than managing other projects (say buildling an airplane or a bridge).
;)
Much of that I believe comes from the ever expanding nature of software itself. Yes we've been programming for half a century now, but the nature and size of the software we write is significantly larger and more complex than anything anyone had to deal with back then (we can thank the hardware companies for that). Then throw in the fact that software is a constantly moving target and things get really screwy. The laws of physics aren't constantly being updated every three years, so airplane builders can focus on improvments within a known environment (for the most part). Could you imagine if the laws of aerodynamics changed every few years with a major paradigm shift every 6 or 7 years (Cooeficient of Drag 7.0 has given way to cd2002 and all your old formula no longer work, sorry).
However, one thing that I really don't hear people talk about insofar as software being a bitch to manage, is the simple fact that it's generally accepted that software will feature creep, be buggy, and that market pressures win out over software robustness. Even those who think that they are not falling prey to this mentality, do it subconsciously. It's the mentality of almost everyone who writes/designs/manages software. It's a iterative process, versions and revs are an integral part of this world.
Oh, and my job sucks. Not really the job, just been doing this for too long
Perhaps a port to Power/PowerPC? I know it's tough since IBM is a workstation competitor, but do they really compete? How many graphics workstation accounts have they lost to IBM I wonder, probably not too many. I guess they do compete for servers though.
What might really be cool is if IBM acquired SGI and made them their specialized graphics workstation division. This way SGI can stop spinning cycles developing servers and focus on high powered graphics. The thought of an Onyx running on a POWER4 cpu is quite intoxicating.
MIPS would survive on its core (fogive the pun) business of supplying embedded systems (including PS1/PS2/PSn).
You are confused, the IA64 is NOT just a RISC chip! It is a VLIW (very long instruction word) chip. Multiple instructions are packaged together. These instructions are executed at the same time, so they MUST be able to run concurrently. The compiler is in charge of making sure these instruction "packets" can indeed run in parallel, making the compilers a total bitch to write. "A car with four wheels, hell we already have cars with four wheels, why do we need another?"
Keep in mind that Apple switched two disparate cpu families and that all the emulation was done in software. Itanic was designed to emulate the x86 in hardware! So while it is interesting to compare, we're talking two fundamentally different situations here. The key point in your last statement is the part about the "consumer market". Obviously Intel is focusing soley on server/advanced workstation market since they can recoup costs by initially charging more (a lot more) and you have a smaller set of apps to rebuild in 64bit. With the P4 chugging along, I don't think that they are killing themselves trying to get Itanic on every desktop right yet. PLUS, if anyone remembers, the 386 was actually _slower_ than the equivlent clock speed 286 for running 16bit real mode code. You just couldn't buy any 286's mainstream above 12Mhz when the 386 came out at 16Mhz, so the clock bump masked the slight decrease in performance (the price you pay for doing things "right"). It wasn't until you could buy 16 and 20Mhz 286's (by then no one cared) that this fact became evident.
generate profit
profit is the key word here. Remember, one shows a profit when ones revenue exceeds ones expenses. The simple act of generating revenue doesn't sully an organization that purports (either explicitly as in non-profits or implicitly by having an ORG TLD) to be not for profit. Organizations have expenses and generating revenues to help cover those expenses. I don't think this type of activity detracts from the original intent of the ORG TLD. Hell, just look at that banner ad at the top of the page.