The obvious reason was the low initial yields. When there was a lot of hype surrounding Cell, they weren't being produced in anything like the numbers to be affordable for most of their proposed uses. By the time they did get the yields up, there wasn't enough demand to get the quantities high enough to make the economies of scale kick in and make them anything other than a niche product.
Remember the launch? IBM, Sony and Toshiba were going to put Cell processors in everything from cheap consumer electronics to number crunching supercomputers. In reality, IBM sold a few Cell blades, Sony put one in each PS3 and that's about it.
Yup. And it's a really stupid idea giving kids lego bricks too. I mean, how often do you see a house or a bridge built out of lego? And what about meccano? I've never seen anyone make a car out of meccano! These toys have no place in education.
Pointers are easy. The difficult thing is getting people to understand the concept of indirection. A language like JavaScript contains references, which teach you 90% of what you need to know about pointers. The rest - pointers to pointers and pointer arithmetic - is pretty trivial once you understand the difference between copying and aliasing.
It's actually hard to speculate in oil, simply because there's no place to store enough to make a huge difference
At some time in the next year, I sell this promise to someone else for $11 each. I've made a 10% profit and the price of chickens is now $11 each. Eventually, a year from the start, someone else ends up owning a promise to deliver 100 chickens tomorrow - hopefully this is someone who actually wants the chickens.
Some speculation is useful, because it can even out supply and demand spikes. In my example, knowing that they can sell the chickens makes it much easier for the farmer to produce them in the first place. Similarly, people who know that they will need 100 chickens in the future can buy the promise at some point before it expires and guarantee that they will have them in time.
Unfortunately, if you have a lot of speculators, then they start to influence the market more than actual supply and demand. The USA used to heavily regulate commodities markets, making sure that the influence of speculators was relatively small. Over the last decade or so, they removed most of this regulation.
646 km seems to be about as far as one can drive in the UK --- that's just 400 miles --- not a terribly long trip by U.S. standards
Not a long trip by European standards either, if you're talking about the whole landmass. Sure, the USA is 50 states, but how often do you actually need to drive from coast to coast? I'd imagine not much more often than I need to visit Portugal or Russia.
Why? Seriously, why do you live so far away from where you work? Even assuming that you manage to travel at highway speeds for your entire commute, that's about an hour and a quarter of your life spent each day just getting to and from work.
I assume you realize that your high gas prices are the result of high taxation and not natural market forces
You think natural market forces have anything to do with road transportation in the USA? How much subsidy - state and federal - does the highway system get? What about the car makers (and I'm not just talking about the recent bailouts, look at tax breaks for factories at the state level too)? And that's before you even look at the cost of wars to secure the oil supply.
A little while ago, someone posted a complete breakdown that showed that car travel receives, in total, something like three times as much subsidy as tail travel per passenger mile in the USA.
Facebook only provides a single service: to collect all of your information and provide it to advertisers. Google provides a number of unrelated services and shares data about you between them. This sounds like it would easily contravene the EU data protection directive which says, basically, that you can't transfer personal information to third parties without explicit consent and can't use personal information for anything other than providing the service that the user asked for.
KMS is sensible, as is having the kernel manage memory. The problem is things like GEM that are quite leaky abstractions of the Linux virtual memory subsystem and so are difficult to port to other systems.
* Evolution [memory-alpha.org] [3x01]: good. Wesley screws up an experiment and creates a new artificial intelligence.
Except that creating a real artificial intelligence is something that the Federation's top scientists have failed to do. Data was created by a genius working alone and they want to take him apart to find out how he works - even he fails to duplicate his own creation. Yet, somehow, Wesley accidentally creates a true AI. This makes about as much sense as a school child today accidentally creating a working cold fusion generator for a science fair project and destroying a city block when the reaction goes out of control.
Except that's not how it works. If you host the data on site and there is any down time, then you lose your bonus because your department failed to meet targets. You are also seen as a cost centre. On the other hand, you pay that $50/month and you can show the savings for the the $60K/year salary and get a big bonus. Now the down time is someone else's fault, so it doesn't affect you. The fact that the contract doesn't let you charge the outsourced company is legal's fault, not yours, so you keep the bonus. At the end of the year, you put 'saved current employer $100K/year in overheads' on your CV and move onto the next company. Sure, you may have cost the company $3M in lost business, but that's not in your department's accounting...
The other place where AMD won was upgrades. I had a 133MHz Cyrix Pentium-compatible CPU (which did well clock-for-clock compared to Intel, but they insisted on branding it as a P166 and it was definitely slower than a 166MHz Pentium). I could drop a K6-2 into it for a cheap upgrade. If I wanted a Pentium 2, I needed a new motherboard. A lot of the later Pentium-class systems came with motherboards that supported a 100 or even 133MHz FSB, so you could go right up to a 450MHz K6-3 without having to change anything else.
If you're factoring cost in, AMD's lead dates back to the K6-2. Clock for clock they were slower, but I could get a 400MHz K6-2 and motherboard for less than a 266MHz Pentium 2 and motherboard back then and the K6-2 was a lot faster - especially since it ran the memory 50% faster than the P2.
Why not? It's not like being hit by a meteor, it's something that happens to a lot of people all of the time. You can buy insurance against it that will pay your mortgage while you find a new job. My bank pointed me in the direction of this kind of thing before I signed. Since I'm self employed the insurers didn't want to know, so it's my responsibility to ensure that I have enough spare capital to keep paying the mortgage if I don't have any work for a year or so.
To contract in America you have to be a legal adult.
Unfortunately, the legal definition is based solely on age and not on the ability to assess the consequence of your actions and take responsibility for them...
I think the article itself is trying to say that all wealthy people are evil
No, it's saying that there is a correlation between wealth and immorality, not that all rich people are evil. This isn't entirely surprising - our society is set up in such a way that the easiest way of acquiring wealth is to exploit others, so people who are immoral are more likely to become rich.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious reason was the low initial yields. When there was a lot of hype surrounding Cell, they weren't being produced in anything like the numbers to be affordable for most of their proposed uses. By the time they did get the yields up, there wasn't enough demand to get the quantities high enough to make the economies of scale kick in and make them anything other than a niche product.
Remember the launch? IBM, Sony and Toshiba were going to put Cell processors in everything from cheap consumer electronics to number crunching supercomputers. In reality, IBM sold a few Cell blades, Sony put one in each PS3 and that's about it.
Yup. And it's a really stupid idea giving kids lego bricks too. I mean, how often do you see a house or a bridge built out of lego? And what about meccano? I've never seen anyone make a car out of meccano! These toys have no place in education.
'How do we guaranteed job security for a generation of programmers?'
Are they going skip the concept of Pointers ?
Pointers are easy. The difficult thing is getting people to understand the concept of indirection. A language like JavaScript contains references, which teach you 90% of what you need to know about pointers. The rest - pointers to pointers and pointer arithmetic - is pretty trivial once you understand the difference between copying and aliasing.
It's actually hard to speculate in oil, simply because there's no place to store enough to make a huge difference
At some time in the next year, I sell this promise to someone else for $11 each. I've made a 10% profit and the price of chickens is now $11 each. Eventually, a year from the start, someone else ends up owning a promise to deliver 100 chickens tomorrow - hopefully this is someone who actually wants the chickens.
Some speculation is useful, because it can even out supply and demand spikes. In my example, knowing that they can sell the chickens makes it much easier for the farmer to produce them in the first place. Similarly, people who know that they will need 100 chickens in the future can buy the promise at some point before it expires and guarantee that they will have them in time.
Unfortunately, if you have a lot of speculators, then they start to influence the market more than actual supply and demand. The USA used to heavily regulate commodities markets, making sure that the influence of speculators was relatively small. Over the last decade or so, they removed most of this regulation.
646 km seems to be about as far as one can drive in the UK --- that's just 400 miles --- not a terribly long trip by U.S. standards
Not a long trip by European standards either, if you're talking about the whole landmass. Sure, the USA is 50 states, but how often do you actually need to drive from coast to coast? I'd imagine not much more often than I need to visit Portugal or Russia.
I do 100km each day to work
Why? Seriously, why do you live so far away from where you work? Even assuming that you manage to travel at highway speeds for your entire commute, that's about an hour and a quarter of your life spent each day just getting to and from work.
I assume you realize that your high gas prices are the result of high taxation and not natural market forces
You think natural market forces have anything to do with road transportation in the USA? How much subsidy - state and federal - does the highway system get? What about the car makers (and I'm not just talking about the recent bailouts, look at tax breaks for factories at the state level too)? And that's before you even look at the cost of wars to secure the oil supply.
A little while ago, someone posted a complete breakdown that showed that car travel receives, in total, something like three times as much subsidy as tail travel per passenger mile in the USA.
You mean that we'll see the same sort of international authoritarian control that we've seen grip the telephone networks as a result of ITU control?
Litres are not gallons. The actual result is a bit over $8, although exchange rate fluctuations may change this.
Because that would require Microsoft to be competent at cross referencing and datamining and, well, have you seen Bing?
Facebook only provides a single service: to collect all of your information and provide it to advertisers. Google provides a number of unrelated services and shares data about you between them. This sounds like it would easily contravene the EU data protection directive which says, basically, that you can't transfer personal information to third parties without explicit consent and can't use personal information for anything other than providing the service that the user asked for.
... who has, on his own, by mistake, achieved something that a large team at Cal Tech has been trying to do for the last 100 years or so.
KMS is sensible, as is having the kernel manage memory. The problem is things like GEM that are quite leaky abstractions of the Linux virtual memory subsystem and so are difficult to port to other systems.
Minix 3 is a modern, lightweight, BSD-licensed microkernel operating system. Is that interesting or relevant? It is to me...
* Evolution [memory-alpha.org] [3x01]: good. Wesley screws up an experiment and creates a new artificial intelligence.
Except that creating a real artificial intelligence is something that the Federation's top scientists have failed to do. Data was created by a genius working alone and they want to take him apart to find out how he works - even he fails to duplicate his own creation. Yet, somehow, Wesley accidentally creates a true AI. This makes about as much sense as a school child today accidentally creating a working cold fusion generator for a science fair project and destroying a city block when the reaction goes out of control.
If you actively choose to install and run spyware then no security system in the world can protect you.
Except that's not how it works. If you host the data on site and there is any down time, then you lose your bonus because your department failed to meet targets. You are also seen as a cost centre. On the other hand, you pay that $50/month and you can show the savings for the the $60K/year salary and get a big bonus. Now the down time is someone else's fault, so it doesn't affect you. The fact that the contract doesn't let you charge the outsourced company is legal's fault, not yours, so you keep the bonus. At the end of the year, you put 'saved current employer $100K/year in overheads' on your CV and move onto the next company. Sure, you may have cost the company $3M in lost business, but that's not in your department's accounting...
The other place where AMD won was upgrades. I had a 133MHz Cyrix Pentium-compatible CPU (which did well clock-for-clock compared to Intel, but they insisted on branding it as a P166 and it was definitely slower than a 166MHz Pentium). I could drop a K6-2 into it for a cheap upgrade. If I wanted a Pentium 2, I needed a new motherboard. A lot of the later Pentium-class systems came with motherboards that supported a 100 or even 133MHz FSB, so you could go right up to a 450MHz K6-3 without having to change anything else.
If you're factoring cost in, AMD's lead dates back to the K6-2. Clock for clock they were slower, but I could get a 400MHz K6-2 and motherboard for less than a 266MHz Pentium 2 and motherboard back then and the K6-2 was a lot faster - especially since it ran the memory 50% faster than the P2.
No one ever imagines they will lose their job
Why not? It's not like being hit by a meteor, it's something that happens to a lot of people all of the time. You can buy insurance against it that will pay your mortgage while you find a new job. My bank pointed me in the direction of this kind of thing before I signed. Since I'm self employed the insurers didn't want to know, so it's my responsibility to ensure that I have enough spare capital to keep paying the mortgage if I don't have any work for a year or so.
To contract in America you have to be a legal adult.
Unfortunately, the legal definition is based solely on age and not on the ability to assess the consequence of your actions and take responsibility for them...
I think the article itself is trying to say that all wealthy people are evil
No, it's saying that there is a correlation between wealth and immorality, not that all rich people are evil. This isn't entirely surprising - our society is set up in such a way that the easiest way of acquiring wealth is to exploit others, so people who are immoral are more likely to become rich.