The US would have been bankrupt decades ago, and there would have never been near the same level of economic growth. The gold standard doesn't prevent economic mismanagement.
So, there's economic decline when companies spend their money on employees' health care, but not when the government takes that money and spends it on employees' health care.
The idea is that government has the power to better manage health care costs since it also controls health care regulation. Government can pass laws to cap prices, litigation payments, etc. which private insurance companies cannot do.
Has anyone told Kimi Raikonen, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso how unsafe composite materials are? At the Montreal F1 race Robert Kubica demonstrated how fragile and prone to fire they are when he took a 150 mph flight into the wall.
This is 'merica, we don't watch no F1 racing, we gots NASCAR! And don't be trying to convince me it's safe to be in one o' thems plastic flying machines. We want all steel, with a bed in the back to carry 'round bricks... and naked girl mud flaps.
Isn't the idea to see it before it hits you? I would think it would really suck the other way around, especially with a broadsword.
You don't watch where your blade is, you don't watch how you deflected your opponent's blade... you feel those things. Your eyes are looking for body positions and open angles.
An international cartel of oil/gas producers perhaps? An auto industry focused on short-term profits at the expense of long-term economic and environmental (which is effectively the same thing) viability? A corrupt state power beholden to lobbyists of the previous two groups.
Or more likely consumers who were more interested in horsepower, 0-60, and low cost rather than long-term environmental impact.
An established cartel of successful food producers? An agro-industrial complex focused on, &c.
You mean the same industry that is investing in geneticly modifying food to make it cheaper, faster growing, etc.
To bring a popular example around here, who wouldn't want a better, more secure operating system at a cheaper price?
People who are more interested in an operating system that runs the applications they need.
We're talking about disabling cores that are flawed/nonoperational from the manufacturing process. You have to reach a certain manufacturing point before you can even tell this
Most likely this would be done at the sort process after the silicon is manufactured. You still would need to make the decision whether it makes sense to pay the cost of the backend process (which is getting more expensive, as opposed to silicon which is getting less expensive each generation). If you do decide to build, the cost manufacturing cost to build the lower quality part is the same, yet your selling price will be much lower directly affecting your margins.
Besides, we're talking more about a salvage operation here.
Exactly, the question is whether salvaging a % of silicon makes business sense. To answer that question you need to assess feasibility, process yield, target market. First, from a design standpoint is it feasible to disable cores? It's not trivial to create a multicore design where you arbitrarily disable X cores. For example for the 64-core example, there are 64 different configurations of a 63-core processor possible if 1 is bad. More likely as is done with cache and other designs the overall processor would be segmented in such a way that you have 2 or 4 configurations (lose half or 1 quarter of the cores if 1 core is bad).
From a yield standpoint, if you have a poor performing 64-core process you are in trouble as you are wasting a lot of silicon to make a high end part, if you have a great performing 64-core process you will not have the volume of "partially good" to justify the resources to support managing additional parts.
The third area is target market. Each product created should have a specific market it is going after. If you sell 64-cores @ $640, it doesn't make sense to sell 63-cores @$630; the market is the same for the two parts, it's just costing more to support different products. Also, there may not be a market for a low end product with similar configuration as high end (eg 32-core made out of 64-core). The 32-core market may be looking at smaller form factor, lower, power, etc. which cannot be supported by making the part out of high end silicon.
Oh, agreed. I was just giving examples. If you're getting good yields, depending on architecture it might make more sense to rate them by speed differences, discarding chips with failed cores.
The best example is GPUs, which are already going though this. They already have silicon with 24 cores, and rather than segmenting in multiple ways, they typically have 2 configurations - a fully enabled & 75% enabled. They already build specialized products for the low-end market, so 50% enabled or less doesn't make business sense to support.
When you talk about the volumes involved, having 30 parts would be nothing. There are companies that market tens of thousands of different parts. Look at a company like Bosch for their electric motors alone.
30 parts can mean managing tens of thousands of BOMs, depending on different die stepping, piece part manufacturers, shipping configurations, customer requirements, etc.
To my original point, from a business standpoint it's not as easy as many people think to create new configurations for the same silicon. As chip prices drop and parts become more specialized, there just aren't sufficient markets to support having a wide variety of core-configurations of the same silicon.
I mostly agree, though I'd note that we're talking about the same chips. There wouldn't be a different substrate design, test program, etc... They're the same chips, just with some non-functional parts disabled.
With disabled cores, you are creating lower cost parts. Therefore you need to start balancing all the costs, it doesn't make sense to use the same expensive piece parts to support a lower selling price CPU. You will want to use a simpler (and cheaper) substrate, use less capacitors for power delivery, cheaper heat spreader (since there will be less heat to disipate), and with such design changes most likely test program changes will also be needed.
Add in phasing between chipsets, you're up to 20-30, of which 10 or so could be handled with a couple guys in a warehouse for the legacy support customers.
When you are talking about the volumes involved, it's not about just a couple guys in a warehouse. It takes a lot of work and planning to properly manage parts. Everytime you add more parts to the list it becomes more difficult to properly plan what to build. Will the customer want the high-speed 56 core or the low-speed 64-core? Most planning has to be done months ahead.
People pay through the nose for the fast 64, slightly less for the slow 64, the slow 32 is the 'bargain basement' chip, the fast 32 a slight uprate, etc...
Again it depends on your yields. If you have good yields (in terms of cores) at the high end, it makes more sense to sell different 64-core speeds, than to canibalize those good 64-core parts and sell tham as 56-core to meet demand.
It becomes even more obvious that this is the way to go if you look ahead a bit. On a 64-core CPU in which one core has failed testing, should it be chucked away, or would it still be useful as a 63-core device? Clearly the latter.
*Sigh* Why do so many make this assumption, slashdotters should take a few business/industrial engineering courses to understand it's not as easy as just selling another part. Everytime you add a part to your line-up it costs additional money and resources to manage it. Each part may need it's own substrate design, test programs, software support, etc. It also becomes more difficult to manage what you build in terms of inventory and factory loading.
From a marketing perspective you need to balance your offerings with target sale prices and yields. Obviously a 63-core part will sell for less than a 64-core part, however, the real-world performance may be similar enough that customers will prefer the 63-core part. In that case if your 64-core yields improve to meet demand you will end up selling 64-core parts as 63-core and lose the margin on the silicon.
There will be cases where there is enough difference between parts where it makes sense to create an additional offering (eg disable half for 32-core); but the assumption that a company would segment to each core isn't correct.
At any rate, it sure beats junking parts that are still very effective processors.
Not necessarily, the cost to support additional parts may be more than just scrapping the silicon. It costs just as much to manage a 4-core part as a 3-core but the 3-core would be sold at a lower price. Further, as yield on the 4-core improves you start running into issues supplying 3-cores run into cases where to support SKU demands you sell working 4-core parts as 3-cores and earning less for that good silicon.
Wouldn't it make sense to sell any part that had at least one working core? Meaning that if in making quad-core chips, W% of them ended up only having one working core, X% had 2, Y% had 3, and Z% had four, wouldn't it make the most sense to sell all of these chips?
Not at the cost of supporting all the different SKUs. Supporting all the parts with the different test programs, piece parts, and managing inventories can result in less profit than just scrapping the silicon.
But with dual core some percentage of those 10% can be fused and sold as single core.
Even though you are recovering silicon, there is a cost to support additional SKUs in terms of managing materials, support, & inventories. It might not make sense financially to fuse single cores out of failed dual core.
I've met so many home schooled children and private school children that have excellent relationships with their parents (myself included), doing excellent academically and well off in life, unlike those from public schools.
I've met many public school children (myself included), doing excellent academically and well of in life. It doesn't matter if the school is public, private, or at home; the most important thing is parental involvement. Private or home schooled children have involved parents, otherwise they'd just let them go to public school.
I believe that any reasonable person would consider achieving high grades in school as a good thing. They would also consider achieving poor grades as a bad thing.
There are many reasonable people who would believe that grades can be meaningless. Some people like myself prefer to challenge themselves to the breaking point. I learned more getting a "D" in algebra in 6th grade than I would have getting an "A" in arithmetic that everybody else was taking. Even in college I learned more failing Solid State Physics than if I took Intro to Astronomy.
When looking at your example we have to ask: Will most reasonable people believe that being married is good and unmarried is bad? Probably not, at least not in North America
What about states that refuse to recognize same sex marriages? The majority of reasonable people in the US are against such marriages, that doesn't mean that it is legally right to refuse to acknowledge them.
Now, as for your change in lifestyle comment... I dont know about you, but if I was getting bad grades, and playing video games, I can guarantee you my parents would insist on a change in my lifestyle... (1) no games, (2) It would hurt sitting for at least a few days from the ass whooping I'd get.
There are parents who don't care about grades. Why should the values of others (good grades are important) be imposed on them?
Besides, it really shouldnt matter what SOCIETY does - it should really matter what is right - or wrong... not opinions, not faith, not "everyone does it".
"Right & wrong" are opinions of individuals and society.
For this guy to take such a stand, takes guts... funnily, if you go back in time a bit, substitute games with anything else that shouldnt be sold to a certain age, such as... cigarettes... you find something really interesting... he probably would be in the exact same situation had he not sold 17 year olds cigarettes because he didnt think he should be selling something to a kid who may not yet understand the risks they were undertaking.
It also takes guts for pharmacists to refuse to dispense the "morning after pill." Doesn't mean that society as a whole, or a company should support their unilateral imposition of values.
Though actually, the US has always been rather interventionist. Much like the UK actually. Other European countries have been interventionist in the past but apart from the UK most of them don't have the ability or the will to be interventionist now.
Other European countries are still interventionist, the US has just taken the leadership position in most cases. Other than Iraq, most of the US interventions were UN supported, and involved NATO and/or UN troops... hell the Korean War had troops from Luxembourg. Because of the size of the military, as well as it's political and economic standing in the world, the US is often put in a no-win position. Whenever there is instability or humanitarian crisis the US is challenged for not helping. Yet when it chooses to, it is crucified for the inevitable civilian casualties.
If you are annoyed by indiscriminate killing of civilians [wikipedia.org], you hate America. Got it.
If you are annoyed by indiscriminate killing of civilians you hate pretty much every government. The US isn't the only one in Iraq, and Iraq isn't the only place in the world where "peacekeepers" are involved in killing civilians.
It was nothing more than a straightforward shooter. What about it was interesting or new?
Perhaps because it really wasn't a shooter... I would say it was more of a cinematic adventure with a shooter element.
so it was in an underwater city... so?
It wasn't just in an underwater city, in fact it could have been anywhere. What was important was the background of the underwater utopia's founding. The ideals of Rapture and tragic unravelling is what made it interesting and thought provoking
I give it a 7/10... only because the art-direction was first rate.
It's kinda like saying World of Warcraft deserves 5/10 because it is a horrible RPG and older MMOs had many more advanced elements. You can't always break a game down with a checklist and decide if it is good or not. For many people (myself included) the art direction and story of the game was everything.
It doesn't? So if China had a military base, say in Houston, TX, you would not feel occupied? You'd feel safer?
Not China, but if Germany or Britain had a base in Texas it wouldn't make me feel occupied.
YOU may not think it is an occupation, but I've visited more than a few dozen countries with U.S. military bases (including Poland, where I have a home not far from the U.S. base in Poznan) and the residents don't understand the point of U.S. troops on their soil, not even for defensive purposes.
Those bases are leftovers from the Cold War. Though with the current political landscape of Europe they may not be needed; of course if you look at history the argument could be made they may be needed.
Just because U.S. troops might have been invited by past regimes, does not meant that they are there because the citizens of a nation wanted them there.
That is an internal issue for the country when the leadership & citizens don't agree.
The U.S. doesn't have control over any nation it tried to maintain control over.
Puerto Rico, Guam, & other territories. If you extend that to indirect political control of leadership, the U.S. "controls" much of the world (including Iraq & Afghanistan). Though I would argue that is more international politics than actual control over other countries.
Non-compliance with the crew of an airplane is a criminal offense. Punishable by maximum of 2 years in prison and fine of 50,000HKD (at least that's what it said on my flight)
Subsidies and bail outs in times of so-called "crisis" like I have been trying to discuss are entirely different things.
The specifics in how things work may be different, but the economic impact is the same, you will end up with excess supply. The point solution of bail outs is preferable, as it gives incentive for a business to restructure and do things differently because next time they may not be bailed out.
So the cut rate airlines are profitable and therefore need bailouts?
The cut-rate airlines don't need bailouts, its the larger airlines that accept less profitable routes that end up going bankrupt. From an individual business persepective it does not make sense to service some cities, but it is in the interest of the overall economy to have those routes serviced.
So we should all pay to have people travel to pay with less money because they had to pay higher taxes to support the airlines that brought them to pay us who have to pay taxes for their flights here? What kind of logic is that? The money comes from somewhere.
The tax revenue generated from the increased commerce is higher than the amount of money invested into transportation.
If there is something that builds strength and incourages economy it's the free market model that rewards prudent and effecient running of a business. To skew that equation and arbitrarily alter the natural ballancing of that system is to weaken it.
In some cases it makes sense not to have a perfect free market for a particular industry so that the overall economy gains. Bailouts ensure an abundance of competition, while having such companies publicly traded encourages efficient management (ala the cut rate carriers like Southwest and Jet Blue).
You can take any current crisis of infrastructure you want as an example. Broadband, Electricity, Natural Gas, Roads and highways,
Unlike broadband, electricity, cable, and telcos... the airline industry is vastly competitive. The biggest problems arise when government intervention leads to a monopoly, in the case of airlines it is designed to continue competition.
The basis of competition is to even out supply and demand with the economy at the time.
Which may be ideal in microeconomic terms, but can have a negative impact on the overall economy.
instead of maybe making a better service to attract customers, instead of acknowledging that we are not cattle but people that need some leg room and pushing the seats back to where they were
People have demonstrated they'd rather pay less than receive amenities like legroom and food service, why do you think cut-rate airlines are the most profitable?
Since the money comes from all the citizens that pay taxes instead of just those who fly the planes, thats so much more fair isn't it. So the ones who use the service don't have to pay a slightly higher price when they fly, but all of us do, through taxes. Great solution. Thanks.
But we all gain in the increased commerce generated by airlines. Air travel is essential to support such industries as tourism.
Slashdot Mirror
We want all steel, with a bed in the back to carry 'round bricks... and naked girl mud flaps.
You mean the same industry that is investing in geneticly modifying food to make it cheaper, faster growing, etc.
People who are more interested in an operating system that runs the applications they need.
First, from a design standpoint is it feasible to disable cores? It's not trivial to create a multicore design where you arbitrarily disable X cores. For example for the 64-core example, there are 64 different configurations of a 63-core processor possible if 1 is bad. More likely as is done with cache and other designs the overall processor would be segmented in such a way that you have 2 or 4 configurations (lose half or 1 quarter of the cores if 1 core is bad).
From a yield standpoint, if you have a poor performing 64-core process you are in trouble as you are wasting a lot of silicon to make a high end part, if you have a great performing 64-core process you will not have the volume of "partially good" to justify the resources to support managing additional parts.
The third area is target market. Each product created should have a specific market it is going after. If you sell 64-cores @ $640, it doesn't make sense to sell 63-cores @$630; the market is the same for the two parts, it's just costing more to support different products.
Also, there may not be a market for a low end product with similar configuration as high end (eg 32-core made out of 64-core). The 32-core market may be looking at smaller form factor, lower, power, etc. which cannot be supported by making the part out of high end silicon.
The best example is GPUs, which are already going though this. They already have silicon with 24 cores, and rather than segmenting in multiple ways, they typically have 2 configurations - a fully enabled & 75% enabled. They already build specialized products for the low-end market, so 50% enabled or less doesn't make business sense to support.
30 parts can mean managing tens of thousands of BOMs, depending on different die stepping, piece part manufacturers, shipping configurations, customer requirements, etc.
To my original point, from a business standpoint it's not as easy as many people think to create new configurations for the same silicon. As chip prices drop and parts become more specialized, there just aren't sufficient markets to support having a wide variety of core-configurations of the same silicon.
When you are talking about the volumes involved, it's not about just a couple guys in a warehouse. It takes a lot of work and planning to properly manage parts. Everytime you add more parts to the list it becomes more difficult to properly plan what to build. Will the customer want the high-speed 56 core or the low-speed 64-core? Most planning has to be done months ahead.
Again it depends on your yields. If you have good yields (in terms of cores) at the high end, it makes more sense to sell different 64-core speeds, than to canibalize those good 64-core parts and sell tham as 56-core to meet demand.
From a marketing perspective you need to balance your offerings with target sale prices and yields. Obviously a 63-core part will sell for less than a 64-core part, however, the real-world performance may be similar enough that customers will prefer the 63-core part. In that case if your 64-core yields improve to meet demand you will end up selling 64-core parts as 63-core and lose the margin on the silicon.
There will be cases where there is enough difference between parts where it makes sense to create an additional offering (eg disable half for 32-core); but the assumption that a company would segment to each core isn't correct.
It costs just as much to manage a 4-core part as a 3-core but the 3-core would be sold at a lower price. Further, as yield on the 4-core improves you start running into issues supplying 3-cores run into cases where to support SKU demands you sell working 4-core parts as 3-cores and earning less for that good silicon.
Private or home schooled children have involved parents, otherwise they'd just let them go to public school.
What about states that refuse to recognize same sex marriages? The majority of reasonable people in the US are against such marriages, that doesn't mean that it is legally right to refuse to acknowledge them.
"Right & wrong" are opinions of individuals and society.
It also takes guts for pharmacists to refuse to dispense the "morning after pill." Doesn't mean that society as a whole, or a company should support their unilateral imposition of values.
Because of the size of the military, as well as it's political and economic standing in the world, the US is often put in a no-win position. Whenever there is instability or humanitarian crisis the US is challenged for not helping. Yet when it chooses to, it is crucified for the inevitable civilian casualties.
It wasn't just in an underwater city, in fact it could have been anywhere. What was important was the background of the underwater utopia's founding. The ideals of Rapture and tragic unravelling is what made it interesting and thought provoking
It's kinda like saying World of Warcraft deserves 5/10 because it is a horrible RPG and older MMOs had many more advanced elements. You can't always break a game down with a checklist and decide if it is good or not. For many people (myself included) the art direction and story of the game was everything.
Those bases are leftovers from the Cold War. Though with the current political landscape of Europe they may not be needed; of course if you look at history the argument could be made they may be needed.
That is an internal issue for the country when the leadership & citizens don't agree.
Puerto Rico, Guam, & other territories.
If you extend that to indirect political control of leadership, the U.S. "controls" much of the world (including Iraq & Afghanistan). Though I would argue that is more international politics than actual control over other countries.
I miss Code-wheels or bad sectors on floppies that made your drive make horrible sounds when you tried to copy.
I'm travelling out of the country. I just decided to pull the SIM card and put it in my RAZR... the Phone still makes a nice iPod
Non-compliance with the crew of an airplane is a criminal offense. Punishable by maximum of 2 years in prison and fine of 50,000HKD (at least that's what it said on my flight)
The cut-rate airlines don't need bailouts, its the larger airlines that accept less profitable routes that end up going bankrupt. From an individual business persepective it does not make sense to service some cities, but it is in the interest of the overall economy to have those routes serviced.
The tax revenue generated from the increased commerce is higher than the amount of money invested into transportation.
In some cases it makes sense not to have a perfect free market for a particular industry so that the overall economy gains. Bailouts ensure an abundance of competition, while having such companies publicly traded encourages efficient management (ala the cut rate carriers like Southwest and Jet Blue).
Unlike broadband, electricity, cable, and telcos... the airline industry is vastly competitive. The biggest problems arise when government intervention leads to a monopoly, in the case of airlines it is designed to continue competition.
Which may be ideal in microeconomic terms, but can have a negative impact on the overall economy.
People have demonstrated they'd rather pay less than receive amenities like legroom and food service, why do you think cut-rate airlines are the most profitable?
But we all gain in the increased commerce generated by airlines. Air travel is essential to support such industries as tourism.