Grad students make about 18,000 per year, plus a tuition waiver
Grad students make 18K at UMD? Maybe so at the math department, but the actual number was far south of that over at the EE and CS departments before I could finally get out of there. 18K!!! Holy crap, with that kind of money one might even be able to rent a place at the world-famous, posh Springhill Lake estates at Greenbelt and have money left over to get a bulletproof vest for those late-night strolls in Hyattsville.
In my view Zigbee is going to be huge. Just like Bluetooth was widely misunderstood when it made its debut (commonly asked questions were "why would I need Bluetooth when we have IEEE 802.11b?" and "how is this any better than HomeRF?"), I don't think many people "get it". With Zigbee there finally will be a standard for very low cost, low power wireless communications and a simple enough stack to enable a host of uses in home automatiion, etc.
I am a hardware guy, and the design is far more elegant and simpler than most of the competing CPU's out there; mainly as a result of the push to get it to work at the 4GHz+ frequency range.
I think it's very early to talk about the integer performance of Cell. I have been working on Cell for a few months now, and all I can say is that the integer performance of the PPE core is on par with the competition; and it beats them handily using hand-written code to take advantage of the SPEs.
Agreed, the PPE core only has a 4KB by 2-bit BHT(branch history table). Note that the PPE pipeline depth is only 23 stages (i.e. branch misprediction penalty is 23 cycles), so a misprediction penalty is comparable to designs that run at far, far slower clocks. I am not sure if the main motivation was making chip real estate available for other things: The recent IBM Journal of R & D paper by Kahle et al. is an excellent read to gain insight into the design decisions they took, and I believe they were confident that a more sophisticated branch predictor was unnecessary considering the elegant PowerPC core that they had in their hands (23 FO4 PPE pipeline depth, 11 FO4 SPE pipeline depth, can run at 4GHz plus!).
This is exactly what the Cell SPE's have. The SPE compiler uses "branch hints" that are put in by the compiler using the GCC pragma "__builtin_expect_". Take a look at the "SPU C/C++ Language Extensions" document that was released a while back by the Cell team.
Most of the other posters have no idea what they are talking about. The PPE is a fully PowerPC compliant two-way SMT processor and absolutely has a branch predictor. It is the SPEs (SIMD vector units) that do not have branch prediction, but they do have branch hints. A tacit assumption in the SPE design is that the vector code used in the SPE's will not have too many branches to begin with.
..is Internet-based TV from foreign countries. Globalization is spreading people all over the place, and they want to watch shows in their native language, reflecting their own native culture. There is a huge demand for shows all over the world, and not only for entertainment purposes:I've seen kids of immigrant families(born and raised here in the US) who refuse to speak in anything but English to their moms and dads, and it pains me as much as it pains the parents. Availability of TV shows in the native language would have helped somewhat.
Just look at how successful Telemundo etc. are. Satellite coverage is spotty for many European/Asian televisions here in the US, and Internet is the only option in many cases. I and a lot of people I know would gladly pay for high-quality (as opposed to the problematic Real Video/Windows Media Player feeds we currently have) overseas TV on portable devices and Internet appliances, maybe something like Tivo which can download content from the Internet.
Something like this might be beneficial for people in Third World countries or Africa. This is basically a "human computing grid", facilitated by Amazon and the Internet. People in poorer countries are already doing something along these lines in "click fraud farms"; and this is not only infinitely more ethical and useful, it is legal, too. I don't think anyone but the most idle in the developed and developing countries will devote more than a couple minutes of his/her life to this, but I can see armies of English-speaking African youths earning money by helping tag images and improve the semantic Web.
Now if you excuse me, I have to finish this letter to our embassy here in the US so they can complain about the "mechanical Turk" name officially.
The product and suite and the company clearly look like they both were designed to be "flipped", i.e. bought out by a big player. AJAX-based interfaced for Web mail is the big things now, and both Yahoo, Hotmail and Google are racing to deploy them.
I would really be surprised if the company expected to have a snowball's chance in hell to really compete against Exchange. Just like Outpost (which was bought out by Yahoo), I believe this product will be bought out by a larger player and get integrated into some other product line. I suspect this trend accelerated with that Business 2.0 magazine article about designing companies to be flipped.
A way to implement this: Zyxel access point
on
The Case for Free WiFi?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Zyxel sells an access point designed for just this purpose: ZyAir B-4000. Much easier than implementing it yourself, unless there is already on Open Source solution based on NoCat or something similar.
Not even the brightest CS junior, or even the brightest (lone) CS grad student in any institution all over the world can design something with the complexity of the R10000, which was a fairly sophisticated design. The Chinese have access to very recent process technologies and can easily design and build a simpler processor that would beat your puny FPGA-implemented broken design in a heartbeat. Their goal is to build a base on which they can build a competitive CPU design infrastructure for their local industry.
I found your post mildly disturbing, with an air of superiority that seems to assume that CPU design is an American specialty of some sort. Many of us who work in CPU design and implementation got our graduate degrees from American universities, where an overwhelming majority of the graduate students in our group were foreign. Your CPU's are already being designed by non-Americans, so this might be a good time to get over it. Also, there is much more to talking about microprocessor design than taking a junior level Verilog class, perusing the Hennessy & Patterson book and maybe reading a few ISCA papers. I suggest you take a look at the R10000 paper published in IEEE Computer some years back.
Not really new-I'm sure many Slashdotters who are IEEE members enjoyed the September 2004 issue of IEEE Computer magazine which covered the theme of biologically inspired robotics. There is a paper in that issue by S. Thakoor et al. which uses an optical mouse chip for terrain feature tracking for a flying aerial robot. You can't read the paper if you don't have IEEE digital library access, but here is the link:
The US already owned at least one Mig-23 operating out of Area 51 in the 1980's. Do a search for "General Robert Bond" on Google. Bond was due to retire shortly, and wanted to make a last flight in a Mig-23 before retirement. He lost control of the aircraft and died after ejecting. The fact that the aircraft was a Mig-23 was revealed many years after.
This happened in 1984, so the US already knew almost all there was to know about the basic Mig-23.
What makes you think that Taiwan needs the services of a self-taught amateur cruise missile enthusiast? Taiwan has a sophisticated aerospace industry that has designed, built and flown its indigenous jet fighter, short and medium range air to air missiles. Taiwanese industry can build a cruise missile without this guy's help in very short notice. A cruise missile is not a terribly difficult thing to build anyhow; with the exception of the miniature jet engine you need to obtain a sufficiently long range. It's just that they are not cost effective unless you have a payload that packs quite a punch, and that translates to a WMD.
Re:Kind of like Turkey remake of Star Wars
on
Spider-Man in India
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· Score: 1
Sorry, but this is total BS. At least your explanation of it: These movies were made in 1970 and early 1980s, when the Turkish movie industry was in total abyss(it is significantly better now). There was a demand for such movies, but the industry players had no means to pay the royalty or licencing fees for remaking these movies. They obviously did not have the technical capability to duplicate the effects, either. There was no "censorship law" as such that prohibited American imports, American movies have been shown in Turkey since the beginning of time. A few movies have been banned by the zealous regimes, like "Midnight Express" which was banned until late 1980's. The government finally decided to expose "Midnight Express" for what it was: a silly spectacle full of lies that defended a genuine drug smuggler. It was aired, in full, on state TV. Turkey is probably the only predominantly Muslim democracy in that region of the world now, and hardly any movie is censored or banned.
The movie that you're talking about is "Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam" (The Man Who Saved The World); and it is not, I repeat, NOT a Star Wars remake. It is just an entirely different, ridiculous story line with even more ridiciulous acting, with some scenes lifted wholesale from Star Wars. Not a remake, though. If you seriously believe that the story line was identical; you either have issues with whatever Turkish language education you might have had (Try getting your money back from Berlitz or wherever you went to), or had preconceived notions about people from Turkey not being able to make up a story of their own. Methinks it is the latter.
There is no denying that the movie is awfully bad and hilarious, it was the equivalent of a very bad B movie in Turkey, too. It is now somewhat of a cult movie. Before I moved to the US eight years ago, one TV channel (Show TV) owned all the rights to this movie, and they treasured this movie highly. They aired it from time to time and it got very high ratings every time it was shown, making it highly profitable for the TV channel. When our university social club wanted to have a public showing sometime in 1994, the TV channel declined to give us permission to do it, basically telling us that the movie was an important cash cow for them.
The reviews of the other movie, dubbed the "Turkish Star Trek"(the actual name is "Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda") are somewhat harsh and misleading. This movie never intended to be a Star Trek remake, it was a movie in the Turist Omer series, which was sort of a Turkish version of a stupid Ben Stiller/Will Ferrell/Mike Myers character mix. It never intended to be an earnest science-fiction movie, it was a hilarious comedy that threw in the fantastical "Star Trek" theme offshoot. While I am embarrassed about my countrymen having created "Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam", I offer no apologies for the movie you call "Turkish Star Trek": It is actually a good example of a 1970's fantastic comedy, made with an extremely low budget. I find some 1940s and 1950s American movies equally ridiculous; and the record-breaking French "Fantome" series does not make much more sense than these Turkish movies either.
It is not a copy of X-20. The Soviets already designed AND flew a small space plane called the BOR-4 as a test vehicle for the Buran project. It made sub-orbital flights in 1982 and 1984. It seems that the new Russian "space plane" is based on the BOR-4, or at least the experience gained in the BOR-4 project.
If Middle Eastern nationals tried to sabotage the processes of justice in this country we would declare war on them.
I have a question here for you. Rhetorical as it may be, it will help me understand why you are biased, so please bear with me.
Would you declare war on a band of Western European nationals if they tried to sabotage the processes of justice in this country?(Which I assume is the USA, the country I also happen to live and work in)?
Clearwater Networks has been shipping a network processor unit that uses SMT, to my knowledge this is the only implementation so far. IBM's Blue Gene research supercomputer will also use SMT.
As you pointed out, it is not a big deal to add SMT to a modern superscalar core. Most SMT studies show that the performance improvement maxes out at 4-way simultaneous multithreading however, so SMT will only be a short term solution in the quest for speed..
The paper you've read was most likely written by Joel Emer, a very influential Alpha architect and a major SMT researcher. He was behind the push to include SMT in Alpha 21464; he is now an Intel Fellow if I remember correctly. With Emer an Intel employee and director now, it is very likely that most of the Alpha SMT research is being integrated into the next generation x86 and EPIC processor plans...
Am I the only one who thinks a 600mhz CPU w/4mb of L2 cache can smoke a 1+ghz x86/POW whatever w/32/128k of cache?
Why, yes; apparently. The widely accepted, true benchmark of raw processor performance is the SPEC benchmark suite. Athlon XP1900; which has 64KB on-chip L1 cache and 256KB on-chip L2 cache has a SPECint2000 rating of 677. SGI Origin 300, which has a 500MHz R14000 CPU with 32KB on-chip L1 I-cache and 32KB on-chip L1 D-cache; and 2MB OFF-chip L2 cache has a SPECint2000 rating of 365. The floating point numbers are nor really that different, it is 634 vs. 378 in the FP front. And no, unlike the toy benchmarks in the hardware sites of teenage "experts"; higher numbers are better. Check the numbers for yourself at http://www.spec.org.
The 4MB L2 cache that the SGI machine has is off-chip; and you can see for yourself from the SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000 numbers that the performance improvement does not really help the SGI machine to keep up with x86 boxes.
Granted, the SGI Origin 300 has a 500MHz speed; but unlike they came up with some drastic architecture change between the 500MHz and the 600MHz versions, it is certain that an Athlon XP1900 will handily beat these newfangled SGI boxes in raw performance, and will cost a lot less.
I should know, I used to be an H-1B programmer myself. And I never made less than any of my peers of equal experience or education level; or get my passport confiscated, or threatened, or anything like that..Most of this is BS generated by the Norman Matloff bunch.
What exactly is the "sheik styling" you are talking about? Perhaps they are targeting the affluent Saudi Arabian market, but I doubt there is a high demand for PDA's in that part of the world.
Is this "sheik style" related to "chic styling" in any way?
kegger (keg'ger) n. (see "keg party"): It took me a while to understand it when I first came to US for grad school five years ago; then one day the undergrads in my class invited me to one. It is basically a party where a couple enterprising American undergrads go and buy a "keg" (a metal barrel, basically) of beer. The whole point is to drink lots of beer, make pointless jokes and hopefully hook up with someone before the night is over. They seem to enjoy keggers immensely here.
Slashdot Mirror
Grad students make about 18,000 per year, plus a tuition waiver
Grad students make 18K at UMD? Maybe so at the math department, but the actual number was far south of that over at the EE and CS departments before I could finally get out of there. 18K!!! Holy crap, with that kind of money one might even be able to rent a place at the world-famous, posh Springhill Lake estates at Greenbelt and have money left over to get a bulletproof vest for those late-night strolls in Hyattsville.
In my view Zigbee is going to be huge. Just like Bluetooth was widely misunderstood when it made its debut (commonly asked questions were "why would I need Bluetooth when we have IEEE 802.11b?" and "how is this any better than HomeRF?"), I don't think many people "get it". With Zigbee there finally will be a standard for very low cost, low power wireless communications and a simple enough stack to enable a host of uses in home automatiion, etc.
I am a hardware guy, and the design is far more elegant and simpler than most of the competing CPU's out there; mainly as a result of the push to get it to work at the 4GHz+ frequency range.
I think it's very early to talk about the integer performance of Cell. I have been working on Cell for a few months now, and all I can say is that the integer performance of the PPE core is on par with the competition; and it beats them handily using hand-written code to take advantage of the SPEs.
Agreed, the PPE core only has a 4KB by 2-bit BHT(branch history table). Note that the PPE pipeline depth is only 23 stages (i.e. branch misprediction penalty is 23 cycles), so a misprediction penalty is comparable to designs that run at far, far slower clocks. I am not sure if the main motivation was making chip real estate available for other things: The recent IBM Journal of R & D paper by Kahle et al. is an excellent read to gain insight into the design decisions they took, and I believe they were confident that a more sophisticated branch predictor was unnecessary considering the elegant PowerPC core that they had in their hands (23 FO4 PPE pipeline depth, 11 FO4 SPE pipeline depth, can run at 4GHz plus!).
This is exactly what the Cell SPE's have. The SPE compiler uses "branch hints" that are put in by the compiler using the GCC pragma "__builtin_expect_". Take a look at the "SPU C/C++ Language Extensions" document that was released a while back by the Cell team.
Most of the other posters have no idea what they are talking about. The PPE is a fully PowerPC compliant two-way SMT processor and absolutely has a branch predictor. It is the SPEs (SIMD vector units) that do not have branch prediction, but they do have branch hints. A tacit assumption in the SPE design is that the vector code used in the SPE's will not have too many branches to begin with.
..is Internet-based TV from foreign countries. Globalization is spreading people all over the place, and they want to watch shows in their native language, reflecting their own native culture. There is a huge demand for shows all over the world, and not only for entertainment purposes:I've seen kids of immigrant families(born and raised here in the US) who refuse to speak in anything but English to their moms and dads, and it pains me as much as it pains the parents. Availability of TV shows in the native language would have helped somewhat.
Just look at how successful Telemundo etc. are. Satellite coverage is spotty for many European/Asian televisions here in the US, and Internet is the only option in many cases. I and a lot of people I know would gladly pay for high-quality (as opposed to the problematic Real Video/Windows Media Player feeds we currently have) overseas TV on portable devices and Internet appliances, maybe something like Tivo which can download content from the Internet.
Something like this might be beneficial for people in Third World countries or Africa. This is basically a "human computing grid", facilitated by Amazon and the Internet. People in poorer countries are already doing something along these lines in "click fraud farms"; and this is not only infinitely more ethical and useful, it is legal, too. I don't think anyone but the most idle in the developed and developing countries will devote more than a couple minutes of his/her life to this, but I can see armies of English-speaking African youths earning money by helping tag images and improve the semantic Web.
Now if you excuse me, I have to finish this letter to our embassy here in the US so they can complain about the "mechanical Turk" name officially.
Bill Gates was an undergraduate in the Math department before he dropped out, you might want to get your facts straight.
The product and suite and the company clearly look like they both were designed to be "flipped", i.e. bought out by a big player. AJAX-based interfaced for Web mail is the big things now, and both Yahoo, Hotmail and Google are racing to deploy them.
I would really be surprised if the company expected to have a snowball's chance in hell to really compete against Exchange. Just like Outpost (which was bought out by Yahoo), I believe this product will be bought out by a larger player and get integrated into some other product line. I suspect this trend accelerated with that Business 2.0 magazine article about designing companies to be flipped.
Zyxel sells an access point designed for just this purpose: ZyAir B-4000. Much easier than implementing it yourself, unless there is already on Open Source solution based on NoCat or something similar.
s p
1 060053881&indexcate1=1085450334&indexFlagvalue=102 1876859
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1650238,00.a
http://www.zyxel.com/product/model.php?indexcate=
Not even the brightest CS junior, or even the brightest (lone) CS grad student in any institution all over the world can design something with the complexity of the R10000, which was a fairly sophisticated design. The Chinese have access to very recent process technologies and can easily design and build a simpler processor that would beat your puny FPGA-implemented broken design in a heartbeat. Their goal is to build a base on which they can build a competitive CPU design infrastructure for their local industry.
I found your post mildly disturbing, with an air of superiority that seems to assume that CPU design is an American specialty of some sort. Many of us who work in CPU design and implementation got our graduate degrees from American universities, where an overwhelming majority of the graduate students in our group were foreign. Your CPU's are already being designed by non-Americans, so this might be a good time to get over it. Also, there is much more to talking about microprocessor design than taking a junior level Verilog class, perusing the Hennessy & Patterson book and maybe reading a few ISCA papers. I suggest you take a look at the R10000 paper published in IEEE Computer some years back.
Not really new-I'm sure many Slashdotters who are IEEE members enjoyed the September 2004 issue of IEEE Computer magazine which covered the theme of biologically inspired robotics. There is a paper in that issue by S. Thakoor et al. which uses an optical mouse chip for terrain feature tracking for a flying aerial robot. You can't read the paper if you don't have IEEE digital library access, but here is the link:
3 8abs.htm
http://csdl.computer.org/comp/mags/co/2004/09/r90
The US already owned at least one Mig-23 operating out of Area 51 in the 1980's. Do a search for "General Robert Bond" on Google. Bond was due to retire shortly, and wanted to make a last flight in a Mig-23 before retirement. He lost control of the aircraft and died after ejecting. The fact that the aircraft was a Mig-23 was revealed many years after.
This happened in 1984, so the US already knew almost all there was to know about the basic Mig-23.
I am pointing out why it is not even hypothetically possible. Your hypothesis that Taiwan may even be remotely interested in this avenue is absurd.
What makes you think that Taiwan needs the services of a self-taught amateur cruise missile enthusiast? Taiwan has a sophisticated aerospace industry that has designed, built and flown its indigenous jet fighter, short and medium range air to air missiles. Taiwanese industry can build a cruise missile without this guy's help in very short notice. A cruise missile is not a terribly difficult thing to build anyhow; with the exception of the miniature jet engine you need to obtain a sufficiently long range. It's just that they are not cost effective unless you have a payload that packs quite a punch, and that translates to a WMD.
Sorry, but this is total BS. At least your explanation of it: These movies were made in 1970 and early 1980s, when the Turkish movie industry was in total abyss(it is significantly better now). There was a demand for such movies, but the industry players had no means to pay the royalty or licencing fees for remaking these movies. They obviously did not have the technical capability to duplicate the effects, either. There was no "censorship law" as such that prohibited American imports, American movies have been shown in Turkey since the beginning of time. A few movies have been banned by the zealous regimes, like "Midnight Express" which was banned until late 1980's. The government finally decided to expose "Midnight Express" for what it was: a silly spectacle full of lies that defended a genuine drug smuggler. It was aired, in full, on state TV. Turkey is probably the only predominantly Muslim democracy in that region of the world now, and hardly any movie is censored or banned.
The movie that you're talking about is "Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam" (The Man Who Saved The World); and it is not, I repeat, NOT a Star Wars remake. It is just an entirely different, ridiculous story line with even more ridiciulous acting, with some scenes lifted wholesale from Star Wars. Not a remake, though. If you seriously believe that the story line was identical; you either have issues with whatever Turkish language education you might have had (Try getting your money back from Berlitz or wherever you went to), or had preconceived notions about people from Turkey not being able to make up a story of their own. Methinks it is the latter.
There is no denying that the movie is awfully bad and hilarious, it was the equivalent of a very bad B movie in Turkey, too. It is now somewhat of a cult movie. Before I moved to the US eight years ago, one TV channel (Show TV) owned all the rights to this movie, and they treasured this movie highly. They aired it from time to time and it got very high ratings every time it was shown, making it highly profitable for the TV channel. When our university social club wanted to have a public showing sometime in 1994, the TV channel declined to give us permission to do it, basically telling us that the movie was an important cash cow for them.
The reviews of the other movie, dubbed the "Turkish Star Trek"(the actual name is "Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda") are somewhat harsh and misleading. This movie never intended to be a Star Trek remake, it was a movie in the Turist Omer series, which was sort of a Turkish version of a stupid Ben Stiller/Will Ferrell/Mike Myers character mix. It never intended to be an earnest science-fiction movie, it was a hilarious comedy that threw in the fantastical "Star Trek" theme offshoot. While I am embarrassed about my countrymen having created "Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam", I offer no apologies for the movie you call "Turkish Star Trek": It is actually a good example of a 1970's fantastic comedy, made with an extremely low budget. I find some 1940s and 1950s American movies equally ridiculous; and the record-breaking French "Fantome" series does not make much more sense than these Turkish movies either.
It is not a copy of X-20. The Soviets already designed AND flew a small space plane called the BOR-4 as a test vehicle for the Buran project. It made sub-orbital flights in 1982 and 1984. It seems that the new Russian "space plane" is based on the BOR-4, or at least the experience gained in the BOR-4 project.
Photoshere
If Middle Eastern nationals tried to sabotage the processes of justice in this country we would declare war on them.
I have a question here for you. Rhetorical as it may be, it will help me understand why you are biased, so please bear with me.
Would you declare war on a band of Western European nationals if they tried to sabotage the processes of justice in this country?(Which I assume is the USA, the country I also happen to live and work in)?
Thank you.
Clearwater Networks has been shipping a network processor unit that uses SMT, to my knowledge this is the only implementation so far. IBM's Blue Gene research supercomputer will also use SMT.
As you pointed out, it is not a big deal to add SMT to a modern superscalar core. Most SMT studies show that the performance improvement maxes out at 4-way simultaneous multithreading however, so SMT will only be a short term solution in the quest for speed..
The paper you've read was most likely written by Joel Emer, a very influential Alpha architect and a major SMT researcher. He was behind the push to include SMT in Alpha 21464; he is now an Intel Fellow if I remember correctly. With Emer an Intel employee and director now, it is very likely that most of the Alpha SMT research is being integrated into the next generation x86 and EPIC processor plans...
Am I the only one who thinks a 600mhz CPU w/4mb of L2 cache can smoke a 1+ghz x86/POW whatever w/32/128k of cache?
Why, yes; apparently. The widely accepted, true benchmark of raw processor performance is the SPEC benchmark suite. Athlon XP1900; which has 64KB on-chip L1 cache and 256KB on-chip L2 cache has a SPECint2000 rating of 677. SGI Origin 300, which has a 500MHz R14000 CPU with 32KB on-chip L1 I-cache and 32KB on-chip L1 D-cache; and 2MB OFF-chip L2 cache has a SPECint2000 rating of 365. The floating point numbers are nor really that different, it is 634 vs. 378 in the FP front. And no, unlike the toy benchmarks in the hardware sites of teenage "experts"; higher numbers are better. Check the numbers for yourself at http://www.spec.org.
The 4MB L2 cache that the SGI machine has is off-chip; and you can see for yourself from the SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000 numbers that the performance improvement does not really help the SGI machine to keep up with x86 boxes.
Granted, the SGI Origin 300 has a 500MHz speed; but unlike they came up with some drastic architecture change between the 500MHz and the 600MHz versions, it is certain that an Athlon XP1900 will handily beat these newfangled SGI boxes in raw performance, and will cost a lot less.
I should know, I used to be an H-1B programmer myself. And I never made less than any of my peers of equal experience or education level; or get my passport confiscated, or threatened, or anything like that..Most of this is BS generated by the Norman Matloff bunch.
What exactly is the "sheik styling" you are talking about? Perhaps they are targeting the affluent Saudi Arabian market, but I doubt there is a high demand for PDA's in that part of the world.
Is this "sheik style" related to "chic styling" in any way?
When did AMD exactly get out of CPUs? AMD has been making CPU's since the early 1970's, with no interruption.
kegger (keg'ger) n. (see "keg party"): It took me a while to understand it when I first came to US for grad school five years ago; then one day the undergrads in my class invited me to one. It is basically a party where a couple enterprising American undergrads go and buy a "keg" (a metal barrel, basically) of beer. The whole point is to drink lots of beer, make pointless jokes and hopefully hook up with someone before the night is over. They seem to enjoy keggers immensely here.
skunk? You mean sco?
No, if he meant SCO; he probably would have said "skank", not "skunk".