To say that is an insult to all reptilians from Zeta Andromedae who routinely dismembers, kills and eats small children and kittens, and who has explicitly stated an agenda of exterminating the human race, all except for the few kept to be eaten alive for food, of course, and that secretly worships Satan.
Take it back!
Iman Wilkens makes a case for the Trojan War not occuring in the Mediteranean and tries to map it to England.
http://www.troy-in-england.com...
Perhaps this is another candidate location for the war.
At 1.5 MW it can cook dinner for a whole city. Reminds me of all the Mainframes that got donated to universities since the 60's. They're really neat to have as a museum piece (even if they do consume the entire basement's space), but no University runs them because they can't afford the power to turn them on.
I think that RC4 would fly faster on an IA64 than an opteron
So this code should run directly on an Pentium IV with EM64T. Anybody tried it, yet? How about trying it with the Intel C compiler. Most benchmarks use the Intel compiler, even on AMD CPUs because its so much better than GCC.
I don't buy the argument that its the extra registers, because there have been over 56 registers available for register renaming since the early-mid 90's.
Re:X10.com Has some interesting toys for this
on
Home Defense, Geek Style?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In addition to an outdoor camera, you can get a motion detector and camera kit that turns on a VCR when triggered and also has a German Shepherd voice synthesizer, virtual Robo Dog. All kinds of gagets for a geek, and pretty simple to install even if you aren't. If you want to go for broke you can get the whole security system and program it to turn the lights on after the second time the robo dog barks. Or whatever -- be creative. Smart Home also has stuff (although some of its the same) if you want a 2nd source.
Finally, if you're in Bush Country, just go door-to-door with your good buddies Smith & Wesson (grin).
"Ya kanno due et, Cap'in. Its again' tha loughs o' physics."
There's this thing called "Intrinsic Safety" that states categorically that there is not enough voltage / current from a cell phone battery to ignite Hydrogen, let alone gasoline. Check out the chart on page 2 of this document on Intrinsic Safety. (Its the chart labeled Ignition Curves -- note that your 3.6V cell phone battery is off the chart to the left and doesn't have the 100A+ capability to intersect even the most explosive gas curve -- ever.)
There, now you all know better, so quit repeating the lie; cell phones don't, won't and can't torch gas stations!
DDR2 isn't much better than DDR1, but it's much more expensive.
Actually, with posted writes, DDR2 performance is much better.
As far as being more expensive, that's always true when any new memory technology is introduced. However, within a year of introduction you reach the price parity cross-over. Since that's before the dual core shows up, it could actually be more expensive to be using the trailing-edge DDR1 technology.
Finally, FB-DIMMs are DDR-2. They just add a buffer to the DIMM for all the address, data and control lines, not just some of them like Registered DIMMs.
Isn't that Intel's party line for waiting so long on 64-bits? The more AMD and Intel claim to be different, the more they act the same.
Um, the market would be me. The time would be now.
Bring it on!
And how many million did you want a month? Ah, I see, talk big, but buy only one. And that's the reason you won't see it for a while. These guys make millions of CPUs a week. So before you put on the tinfoil hat and decry how they just don't understand the market, realize its the actions of many, not the few that drive the economics behind the progess of technology.
As far as the dual core opterons being pin compatible, that's not necessarily a good thing. For one it means that it will continue to be stuck in old technology. DDR-2 is out now, but this means that Opteron is doomed to the outdated DDR-1 for another 2 years.
In 1991 I was driving on I-35 in Iowa out in the middle of nowhere between Des Moines and Minneapolis. I overtook Robosaurus, folded down and being transported by a Semi.
This appears to be an updated version of at least the face. If the guy (or gal) who built / owns / shows Robosaurus has figured out a way to make a living at it for all these years, then I say, more power to 'em.
Besides what else you gonna do with a car-eating, fire-breathing robot than show him off for cash. His diet of cars, although high in iron, is nevertheless pretty pricey.
Unfortunately, all the technology in the world will not overcome the key problem of nano-scale structures.
Not necessarily true. Just because we don't need to use them anymore with current Si, doesn't mean that fault-tolerant gates can't be designed to compensate for these issues in Spintronics.
Let's face it, the occurrence of SEUs (single event upsets) is on the order of 200 FITs (failures per million hours), which is pretty low to begin with (now that the industry got rid of the alpha particle sources in the packaging). Tripple redundancy, or encoded logic w/ error correction can improve the reliability on the Order of n-squared (or n-cubed if you want to cascade the circuitry). Its just a matter of how much redundancy you want to design in, how much reliability you want, and the volumetric reduction Spintronics gives you with which to impliment the detection/recovery logic.
Magnetic and electric fields are quite related, and only independent phenomena in time-independent processes (ie, electrostatics and magnetostatics).
As it turns out, Magnetism does not exist. Magnetism is merely a manifestation of the quantum properties of matter -- Magnetism is the electron wave. In Collective Electrodynamics, Dr. Carver Mead moves beyond Maxwell, and incorporates the benefits of various experiments that Maxwell did not have access to. You can see a review of the book, here.
However, the system itself is very static, because of the ``winner take all'' method.
Of course it is. Think of it as a great example of the Nash equilibrium. Stability is one of the benefits that comes from this. Your examples are way too theoretical, so let's talk about some specific cases.
First of all those aren't the only 3 possibilities. In 1860, the Democratic-Republican Party ("Party C") beat both of the predominant 2-parties, and Southerners from both parties, A and B, simply disolved the Constitution and created a new country. From this historical distance, it may look like a special case of your 2nd example, but again, all the parties redefined themselves after the Civil War, living on in name only.
In the 1980s, Reagan carried the Republicans into power because traditionally Democratic Party blue-collar, working stiffs voted for him. The veneer of the parties stayed the same, but there was a wholesale shift of a major constituency underneath. And when the fiction of the Laffer Curve fell apart, they switched back and replaced the Republicans with the Democrats in 1992. [So in a way it was actually Regan's "voodoo economics" that gave us Bill Clinton (grin). But I digress.]
Again in 2000, Party C, the Greens showed up with Ralph Nader. It basically cost the Democrats the election. In the static view, these voters would be Party C, forever. However, the way it is really playing out is that the Democrats have redefined themselves over the last 3 years and are making explicit overtures to those voters. Heck, Ralph Nader no longer feels that he can even call himself a Green.
As a rough analogy, think of it as political capitalism -- not unlike like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Each has a significant marketshare, and each is jockeying with the other to attract more people. There are still Orange Crush and A&W drinkers out there, but both companies augment their offerings with product that appeal to those drinkers as well. I don't know that I'd try and stretch the analogy much farther because softdrink markets are not politics.
As far as "lost votes" go, you could easily make the case that its always true. For example, in the 2000 Presidential election, the majority voted against Mr. Bush. Were all those votes "lost"? Hardly, it just started the jockeying for votes in the 2004 election, where both parties are competing for the "swing voters". In fact it contributed to a significant change in the balance of power in the Senate, as Senator Jeffords felt compelled to change parties to realign with the results of his constituents and those "lost votes". This also points out, that static view of the 2-party system ascribes way too much power to the Executive Branch (President) in the US government. The Congress is much more fine grained.
What you are really pointing out is that it requires a minimum "threshold" of public consensus to move the course of the 2-party system. IMHO, that's a good thing and in concert with the idea of a Representative Democracy. It basically introduces Histeresis or Capacitance, if you will, into the system to minimize the amount of undeliberated ideas that are specious. The fact that the majority parties are jockeying for constituencies as they redefine themselves every election cycle, allows the good ideas to pop to the top, keeps the bad ideas to a minimum, and allows time for rational thought to prevail over unfettered emotion.
I certainly would be interested in others' thoughts on how these are addressed in India's elections, in particular, and in Parliamentary governments in general.
Are you actually in favor of the US 2-party system?
Please don't mistake my comments as being an apologist view of the US's 2-party system. I merely point out that the parent view was over-simplified and missed some of the subtleties. I also point out one of the disadvantages of the Parliamentary system that this approach sidesteps. One need look no farther than the Israeli government to see the flaw of a Parliamentary government is only pouring gasoline on the flames of Palestine when they give the incremental power to make or break a government to the splinter parties. The 2-party system has its problems to be sure, but I merely point out that in actual practice it is actually more centrist (drives both parties to the middle) than the world view expressed above.
I for one am glad that India is a democracy, Parliamentary or not, and am happy to see them exercise their mandate. I'm also keenly interested in the outcome and experience of using the technology, as it serves as a great empirical test case for this kind of solution.
As Winston Churchill once said: "Democracy is the worst form of government known to man -- except for all the others."
I'm not sure which would be better, 2 strong parties, like in the US, or dozens of small parties forming coalitions, like in India.
To think that the US has "2 strong parties" is a pretty static view of US politics. Actually, the Democratic and Republican parties "rediscover" themselves every 4 years. They have vested interests, not unlike the splinter parties in a parliamentary system, that are basically historical reminants from the last cycle. On average their splinter constituencies norm to the "conservative" / "liberal" attribute that everyone labels the parties with. But because they have essentially "worked out" the power sharing stuff before the election, they sidestep the paralyzing impact of splinter politics that plague parlaimentary systems during their term of office.
The BBC is reporting that a NASA satellite designed to test frame dragging, predicted by the theory of relativity, has been delayed for 24 hours because mission control couldn't verify the correct software had been loaded.
What if it already happened, and the effect is that it looks like the software wasn't loaded? Its like the guy who tested his time machine by going back five minutes in time. Then every five minutes he kept starting his time machine test by going back five minutes in time.
It's interesting to note that quite a few people have made it to the peak of Everest, and then died on the way down.
So as long as they don't impregnate someone at the top, its a gene that will eliminate itself. See, these are the kinds of things that would spice up the Darwin Awards.
Of course it will pale in comparison to Phase 2, when the European Space Agency augments the Skis with a JATO pack for the return trip, and possibly suborbital flight.
You can basically do any two input logic with the block (16 posibilities). Not exactly intuitive (to me, anyway), but some more interesting ones -- NAND Gate: 1110, XOR Gate: 0110, XNOR Gate: 1001.
Latches and flip-flops would be a good addition, too. But like someone above said, too bad you can't configure them in loops.
What I'd really like to see are some Quantum logic gates -- Toffoli, Fenyman, Hadamard, Pauli, etc. That would be actually interesting to play around with, even if it was only a PIC simulating Quantum logic. Add a wheeled frame with some motors as an eBlock and you could do some killer Breitenburg vehicles.
Once you get rid of the note taking crutch, you're forced into critical thinking -- that's how people actually learn.
No. That's how you apparently think you learn. Having taught, and done course development over several years, you see lots of different learning styles. In fact Education theory requires you to provide for all four of the different learning styles in your course and lesson design. (Unfortunately, don't expect that from a University -- they are rewarded for research, not teaching.)
As it turns out, I'm just the opposite of you; I learn best by taking notes. For me it goes into the head through parallel channels (ear, eye, hand). It doesn't keep me from thinking critically, and more often than not, I am the one asking the questions. More than that I'm doing it on the wireless laptop without paper (Franklin-Covey PowerNotes, although Word would work as well). And I'm talking about courses like Fault Tolerance Computing, and Model Checking (although I had to go back to paper and pencil for Quantum Computing). Want to research a fact briefly, Google on the spot. Want to check against the class webpage, or pull up the Cadence tool to check something, just a few keystrokes/mouse clicks.
Having wireless on campus has made me not only a better student but also allows me to work School in with Work. Before the campus was wireless, I had to find the magic hallway Ethernet outlets or travel blocks across campus to plug in at the ECE department labs. Wireless has made a significant difference in my options. And even though my school isn't on the list, I don't care -- wireless has given me options I never had before.
That's not entirely true. My school, at number 31, only recommends Cisco.
This would have been a great counter example, if you hadn't gone on to say "sell 'University' laptops... with Centrino..."(italics added). That makes the Cisco add-in card recommendation irrelevant. The fact that Centrino sales occurred meets the necessary and sufficient conditions of the parent comment's assertion.
And neither would Intel. Its called EPIC, which is one step beyond VLIW (ok maybe only a half a step), which is one step beyond RISC, which is one step beyond CISC (x86).
In fact the AMD/Intel cross-licensing may well be the most significant reason x86 has continued to be the dominant design for so long. The mutual co-opetition has served to make both offerings consistently better over time.
What amazes me is that x86 has been so resilient (x86-64/EMT64 being the latest case in point). For 20+ years we've been hearing about the death of CISC, but all those predictions simply underestimated the ability of x86 to adapt to the new technologies. And the "religious" overselling of the philosophy of RISC and its "unique" benefits has also contributed. RISC, as implemented, was really more than just a reduced instruction set. The speed came as much from other architectural improvements. The superscallar, branch optimizations, register set expansion (through the huge x86 reorder buffer/retirement unit), and the march of computer architecture progress have all been co-opted by x86 which had the market share to afford to invest in the improvements.
The other thing that the existence of the "AMD Intel cross license" comments above overlook is that that cross license does not extend to Itanium. So, while its OK for AMD and Intel to reverse engineer each other on the x86 (they essentially share an IP portfolio here), that does not apply to other architectures.
There's only one CEO. His salary makes no difference to the bottom line of a giant multinational.
I'd bet all the stockholders in Enron and WorldCom would like to have had the option. If you want to get rid of the kind of hubris that callously crushes the communities that spawned the multinationals, and that led to the excesses at Enron and WorldCom, maybe putting the executive office jobs on the line would be a good start.
You could move every single job in America to China and still you only gonna raise wages like 10 bucks a week.
I agree with you in theory, and over the long run. But I'm talking about right now. I personally know people who are hiring there right now, and they tell me they are paying close to US wages today, and they aren't willing to settle for green, wet-behind-the-years new graduates.
The vast majority of money put toward a chip is in the design, not the manufacturing.
The intro only talks about it being taped out. That isn't the end of the design effort. In fact, that's when the really expensive validation work begins. Now its true that the amount of people (and thus salaries) goes down, but the really expensive validation phase ususally consumes more than half the R&D of a development. Heck, a single machine configuration to run benchmarks runs in the Millions of dollars (US).
Slashdot Mirror
To say that is an insult to all reptilians from Zeta Andromedae who routinely dismembers, kills and eats small children and kittens, and who has explicitly stated an agenda of exterminating the human race, all except for the few kept to be eaten alive for food, of course, and that secretly worships Satan. Take it back!
so ... when seconds count,
the cops are only minutes away?
Iman Wilkens makes a case for the Trojan War not occuring in the Mediteranean and tries to map it to England. http://www.troy-in-england.com... Perhaps this is another candidate location for the war.
But can it cook me dinner yet?
At 1.5 MW it can cook dinner for a whole city. Reminds me of all the Mainframes that got donated to universities since the 60's. They're really neat to have as a museum piece (even if they do consume the entire basement's space), but no University runs them because they can't afford the power to turn them on.
Just imagine a whole Beowulf cluster of these babies!
When they talk about 5 nines in big iron, who knew it would be the percentage of time spend in the System Idle Process?
I think that RC4 would fly faster on an IA64 than an opteron
So this code should run directly on an Pentium IV with EM64T. Anybody tried it, yet? How about trying it with the Intel C compiler. Most benchmarks use the Intel compiler, even on AMD CPUs because its so much better than GCC.
I don't buy the argument that its the extra registers, because there have been over 56 registers available for register renaming since the early-mid 90's.
In addition to an outdoor camera, you can get a motion detector and camera kit that turns on a VCR when triggered and also has a German Shepherd voice synthesizer, virtual Robo Dog. All kinds of gagets for a geek, and pretty simple to install even if you aren't. If you want to go for broke you can get the whole security system and program it to turn the lights on after the second time the robo dog barks. Or whatever -- be creative. Smart Home also has stuff (although some of its the same) if you want a 2nd source.
Finally, if you're in Bush Country, just go door-to-door with your good buddies Smith & Wesson (grin).
"Ya kanno due et, Cap'in. Its again' tha loughs o' physics."
There's this thing called "Intrinsic Safety" that states categorically that there is not enough voltage / current from a cell phone battery to ignite Hydrogen , let alone gasoline. Check out the chart on page 2 of this document on Intrinsic Safety. (Its the chart labeled Ignition Curves -- note that your 3.6V cell phone battery is off the chart to the left and doesn't have the 100A+ capability to intersect even the most explosive gas curve -- ever.)
There, now you all know better, so quit repeating the lie; cell phones don't, won't and can't torch gas stations!
DDR2 isn't much better than DDR1, but it's much more expensive.
Actually, with posted writes, DDR2 performance is much better.
As far as being more expensive, that's always true when any new memory technology is introduced. However, within a year of introduction you reach the price parity cross-over. Since that's before the dual core shows up, it could actually be more expensive to be using the trailing-edge DDR1 technology.
Finally, FB-DIMMs are DDR-2. They just add a buffer to the DIMM for all the address, data and control lines, not just some of them like Registered DIMMs.
when they "feel there is a market need."
Isn't that Intel's party line for waiting so long on 64-bits? The more AMD and Intel claim to be different, the more they act the same.
Um, the market would be me. The time would be now.
Bring it on!
And how many million did you want a month? Ah, I see, talk big, but buy only one. And that's the reason you won't see it for a while. These guys make millions of CPUs a week. So before you put on the tinfoil hat and decry how they just don't understand the market, realize its the actions of many, not the few that drive the economics behind the progess of technology.
As far as the dual core opterons being pin compatible, that's not necessarily a good thing. For one it means that it will continue to be stuck in old technology. DDR-2 is out now, but this means that Opteron is doomed to the outdated DDR-1 for another 2 years.
In 1991 I was driving on I-35 in Iowa out in the middle of nowhere between Des Moines and Minneapolis. I overtook Robosaurus, folded down and being transported by a Semi.
This appears to be an updated version of at least the face. If the guy (or gal) who built / owns / shows Robosaurus has figured out a way to make a living at it for all these years, then I say, more power to 'em.
Besides what else you gonna do with a car-eating, fire-breathing robot than show him off for cash. His diet of cars, although high in iron, is nevertheless pretty pricey.
Unfortunately, all the technology in the world will not overcome the key problem of nano-scale structures.
Not necessarily true. Just because we don't need to use them anymore with current Si, doesn't mean that fault-tolerant gates can't be designed to compensate for these issues in Spintronics.
Let's face it, the occurrence of SEUs (single event upsets) is on the order of 200 FITs (failures per million hours), which is pretty low to begin with (now that the industry got rid of the alpha particle sources in the packaging). Tripple redundancy, or encoded logic w/ error correction can improve the reliability on the Order of n-squared (or n-cubed if you want to cascade the circuitry). Its just a matter of how much redundancy you want to design in, how much reliability you want, and the volumetric reduction Spintronics gives you with which to impliment the detection/recovery logic.
Magnetic and electric fields are quite related, and only independent phenomena in time-independent processes (ie, electrostatics and magnetostatics).
As it turns out, Magnetism does not exist. Magnetism is merely a manifestation of the quantum properties of matter -- Magnetism is the electron wave. In Collective Electrodynamics, Dr. Carver Mead moves beyond Maxwell, and incorporates the benefits of various experiments that Maxwell did not have access to. You can see a review of the book, here.
However, the system itself is very static, because of the ``winner take all'' method.
Of course it is. Think of it as a great example of the Nash equilibrium. Stability is one of the benefits that comes from this. Your examples are way too theoretical, so let's talk about some specific cases.
First of all those aren't the only 3 possibilities. In 1860, the Democratic-Republican Party ("Party C") beat both of the predominant 2-parties, and Southerners from both parties, A and B, simply disolved the Constitution and created a new country. From this historical distance, it may look like a special case of your 2nd example, but again, all the parties redefined themselves after the Civil War, living on in name only.
In the 1980s, Reagan carried the Republicans into power because traditionally Democratic Party blue-collar, working stiffs voted for him. The veneer of the parties stayed the same, but there was a wholesale shift of a major constituency underneath. And when the fiction of the Laffer Curve fell apart, they switched back and replaced the Republicans with the Democrats in 1992. [So in a way it was actually Regan's "voodoo economics" that gave us Bill Clinton (grin). But I digress.]
Again in 2000, Party C, the Greens showed up with Ralph Nader. It basically cost the Democrats the election. In the static view, these voters would be Party C, forever. However, the way it is really playing out is that the Democrats have redefined themselves over the last 3 years and are making explicit overtures to those voters. Heck, Ralph Nader no longer feels that he can even call himself a Green.
As a rough analogy, think of it as political capitalism -- not unlike like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Each has a significant marketshare, and each is jockeying with the other to attract more people. There are still Orange Crush and A&W drinkers out there, but both companies augment their offerings with product that appeal to those drinkers as well. I don't know that I'd try and stretch the analogy much farther because softdrink markets are not politics.
As far as "lost votes" go, you could easily make the case that its always true. For example, in the 2000 Presidential election, the majority voted against Mr. Bush. Were all those votes "lost"? Hardly, it just started the jockeying for votes in the 2004 election, where both parties are competing for the "swing voters". In fact it contributed to a significant change in the balance of power in the Senate , as Senator Jeffords felt compelled to change parties to realign with the results of his constituents and those "lost votes". This also points out, that static view of the 2-party system ascribes way too much power to the Executive Branch (President) in the US government. The Congress is much more fine grained.
What you are really pointing out is that it requires a minimum "threshold" of public consensus to move the course of the 2-party system. IMHO, that's a good thing and in concert with the idea of a Representative Democracy. It basically introduces Histeresis or Capacitance, if you will, into the system to minimize the amount of undeliberated ideas that are specious. The fact that the majority parties are jockeying for constituencies as they redefine themselves every election cycle, allows the good ideas to pop to the top, keeps the bad ideas to a minimum, and allows time for rational thought to prevail over unfettered emotion.
I certainly would be interested in others' thoughts on how these are addressed in India's elections, in particular, and in Parliamentary governments in general.
Are you actually in favor of the US 2-party system?
Please don't mistake my comments as being an apologist view of the US's 2-party system. I merely point out that the parent view was over-simplified and missed some of the subtleties. I also point out one of the disadvantages of the Parliamentary system that this approach sidesteps. One need look no farther than the Israeli government to see the flaw of a Parliamentary government is only pouring gasoline on the flames of Palestine when they give the incremental power to make or break a government to the splinter parties. The 2-party system has its problems to be sure, but I merely point out that in actual practice it is actually more centrist (drives both parties to the middle) than the world view expressed above.
I for one am glad that India is a democracy, Parliamentary or not, and am happy to see them exercise their mandate. I'm also keenly interested in the outcome and experience of using the technology, as it serves as a great empirical test case for this kind of solution.
As Winston Churchill once said: "Democracy is the worst form of government known to man -- except for all the others."
I'm not sure which would be better, 2 strong parties, like in the US, or dozens of small parties forming coalitions, like in India.
To think that the US has "2 strong parties" is a pretty static view of US politics. Actually, the Democratic and Republican parties "rediscover" themselves every 4 years. They have vested interests, not unlike the splinter parties in a parliamentary system, that are basically historical reminants from the last cycle. On average their splinter constituencies norm to the "conservative" / "liberal" attribute that everyone labels the parties with. But because they have essentially "worked out" the power sharing stuff before the election, they sidestep the paralyzing impact of splinter politics that plague parlaimentary systems during their term of office.
The BBC is reporting that a NASA satellite designed to test frame dragging, predicted by the theory of relativity, has been delayed for 24 hours because mission control couldn't verify the correct software had been loaded.
What if it already happened, and the effect is that it looks like the software wasn't loaded? Its like the guy who tested his time machine by going back five minutes in time. Then every five minutes he kept starting his time machine test by going back five minutes in time.
It's interesting to note that quite a few people have made it to the peak of Everest, and then died on the way down.
So as long as they don't impregnate someone at the top, its a gene that will eliminate itself. See, these are the kinds of things that would spice up the Darwin Awards.
Of course it will pale in comparison to Phase 2, when the European Space Agency augments the Skis with a JATO pack for the return trip, and possibly suborbital flight.
You can basically do any two input logic with the block (16 posibilities). Not exactly intuitive (to me, anyway), but some more interesting ones -- NAND Gate: 1110, XOR Gate: 0110, XNOR Gate: 1001.
Latches and flip-flops would be a good addition, too. But like someone above said, too bad you can't configure them in loops.
What I'd really like to see are some Quantum logic gates -- Toffoli, Fenyman, Hadamard, Pauli, etc. That would be actually interesting to play around with, even if it was only a PIC simulating Quantum logic. Add a wheeled frame with some motors as an eBlock and you could do some killer Breitenburg vehicles.
Once you get rid of the note taking crutch, you're forced into critical thinking -- that's how people actually learn.
No. That's how you apparently think you learn. Having taught, and done course development over several years, you see lots of different learning styles. In fact Education theory requires you to provide for all four of the different learning styles in your course and lesson design. (Unfortunately, don't expect that from a University -- they are rewarded for research, not teaching.)
As it turns out, I'm just the opposite of you; I learn best by taking notes. For me it goes into the head through parallel channels (ear, eye, hand). It doesn't keep me from thinking critically, and more often than not, I am the one asking the questions. More than that I'm doing it on the wireless laptop without paper (Franklin-Covey PowerNotes, although Word would work as well). And I'm talking about courses like Fault Tolerance Computing, and Model Checking (although I had to go back to paper and pencil for Quantum Computing). Want to research a fact briefly, Google on the spot. Want to check against the class webpage, or pull up the Cadence tool to check something, just a few keystrokes/mouse clicks.
Having wireless on campus has made me not only a better student but also allows me to work School in with Work. Before the campus was wireless, I had to find the magic hallway Ethernet outlets or travel blocks across campus to plug in at the ECE department labs. Wireless has made a significant difference in my options. And even though my school isn't on the list, I don't care -- wireless has given me options I never had before.
That's not entirely true. My school, at number 31, only recommends Cisco.
... with Centrino ..."(italics added). That makes the Cisco add-in card recommendation irrelevant. The fact that Centrino sales occurred meets the necessary and sufficient conditions of the parent comment's assertion.
This would have been a great counter example, if you hadn't gone on to say "sell 'University' laptops
Itanium is hardly what I'd call RISC
And neither would Intel. Its called EPIC, which is one step beyond VLIW (ok maybe only a half a step), which is one step beyond RISC, which is one step beyond CISC (x86).
In fact the AMD/Intel cross-licensing may well be the most significant reason x86 has continued to be the dominant design for so long. The mutual co-opetition has served to make both offerings consistently better over time.
What amazes me is that x86 has been so resilient (x86-64/EMT64 being the latest case in point). For 20+ years we've been hearing about the death of CISC, but all those predictions simply underestimated the ability of x86 to adapt to the new technologies. And the "religious" overselling of the philosophy of RISC and its "unique" benefits has also contributed. RISC, as implemented, was really more than just a reduced instruction set. The speed came as much from other architectural improvements. The superscallar, branch optimizations, register set expansion (through the huge x86 reorder buffer/retirement unit), and the march of computer architecture progress have all been co-opted by x86 which had the market share to afford to invest in the improvements.
The other thing that the existence of the "AMD Intel cross license" comments above overlook is that that cross license does not extend to Itanium. So, while its OK for AMD and Intel to reverse engineer each other on the x86 (they essentially share an IP portfolio here), that does not apply to other architectures.
There's only one CEO. His salary makes no difference to the bottom line of a giant multinational.
I'd bet all the stockholders in Enron and WorldCom would like to have had the option. If you want to get rid of the kind of hubris that callously crushes the communities that spawned the multinationals, and that led to the excesses at Enron and WorldCom, maybe putting the executive office jobs on the line would be a good start.
Just a random rant, though.
You could move every single job in America to China and still you only gonna raise wages like 10 bucks a week.
I agree with you in theory, and over the long run. But I'm talking about right now. I personally know people who are hiring there right now, and they tell me they are paying close to US wages today, and they aren't willing to settle for green, wet-behind-the-years new graduates.
The vast majority of money put toward a chip is in the design, not the manufacturing.
The intro only talks about it being taped out. That isn't the end of the design effort. In fact, that's when the really expensive validation work begins. Now its true that the amount of people (and thus salaries) goes down, but the really expensive validation phase ususally consumes more than half the R&D of a development. Heck, a single machine configuration to run benchmarks runs in the Millions of dollars (US).