Ultimately, of course, this is all just a bunch of people being brave in hindsight. We know that guns are effective at deterring normal crimes, however an insane shooter obviously offers a different problem. At some point a shooter is going to run up against an armed citizen, and then we'll find out for sure just how effective they will be. Hopefully that armed citizen is responsible and capable of using their weapon effectively and are not just carrying around a gun to feel safe.
FWIW, I do believe guns can be, and are, legitimately useful in self defense; however, in the scenario of pistol vs body armor + rifle, the pistol user is at a very, very serious disadvantage that can only be overcome by a very high level of still and a good dash of luck.
I don't know where you've got your info on firearms, but you are wildly inaccurate.
1. There are no ceramic parts in a Glock 17.
2. The Glock 17 is not called a "parabellum". The 9mmx19 round is often called "9mm parabellum" or "9mm luger", and the Glock 17 is chambered in "9mm parabellum". However, "parabellum" is not a common nickname for the Glock 17 itself.
3. Tenifer is a surface treatment to protect the steel from wear and corrosion. It has no effect of the compressibility of the steel as a whole. Please read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenifer
While I don't know the exact composition of regular jet fuel, I'm pretty sure it is just as combustible as pure hydrogen if not more so.
Actually, when I was researching the hydrogen-powered design predecessor to the U2 (the Lockeed CL 400), I came across some Air Force tests on the combustibility of liquid hydrogen in spill tests, as a safety concern. It turned out that spilled liquid hydrogen was less combustible than kerosene, as the evaporating hydrogen dissipated too quickly to ignite.
At UF, there are (were?) CS degrees offered though Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as the College of Engineering. I chose the former, as it was an easier administrative change from Physics.
I've also used it on a number of occasions (including some time in Sierra Leone), and I've only had mild side effects (some very, very strange dreams). However, I have seen others react very poorly, too. One of my friends contracted malaria and mono at the same time while in Guinea, and was dosed with massive quantities of lariam to treat it -- he had some serious psychological responses to it. Malaria really sucks, but so does this drug.
BTW, when was your friend posted in Sierra Leone, and is he a Brit Para? I met a few of them when I was working for an NGO in Sierra Leone in 2001.
As naive as it may sound, why not just do less illegal stuff?
Who says they are doing illegal stuff? The government's alleging it, but in the ordinary course of events, the 5th Amendment is supposed to protect us against being required to give evidence against ourselves. We are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Call me naive, but I fail to see the problem with warranted searches. The 5th Amendment doesn't protect us from discovery. You can't physically prevent an officer with a warrant from searching your house. If you have a safe, and the police have a warrant, you *must* give them the key or face obstruction of justice. I fail to see the problem with that, or with being required to give the key to your virtual safe.
As annoying as that is, at least I understand the commercial desire to maximize profit.
Actually, they are minimizing profit. These cables are already licensed. The HDMI org have decided this cable does not meet its specifications, and is revoking the license. They are losing the licensing revenue they would otherwise gain from the sale of these cables.
If it was about contrails, most of you guys would still be wrong. Contrails aren't caused by the turbines, they're caused by the air passing the wingtips of the aircraft. If you want to learn more, there's wikipedia for that.
Contrails (play/kntrelz/; short for "condensation trails") or vapour trails are artificial clouds that are the visible trails of condensed water vapour made by the exhaust of aircraft engines. As the hot exhaust gases cool in the surrounding air they may precipitate a cloud of microscopic water droplets. If the air is cold enough, this trail will be comprised of tiny ice crystals.[1]
The wingtip vortices which trail from the wingtips and wing flaps of aircraft are sometimes partly visible due to condensation in the cores of the vortices. Each vortex is a mass of spinning air and the air pressure at the centre of the vortex is very low. These wingtip vortices are not the same as contrails.
Considering the corruption that has been rampant in the UN, I think it is good we are keeping tabs on how our tax money given to the UN as dues is *actually* spent.
Very, but they still get to vote. Three guesses as to which way "they" lean.
Hmmm.... I'm guessing the opposite of the way you lean?
Seriously, I want to laugh (and I do) but this (TFA and the sprinkler idiot) is troubling. Not just because these cops are stupid, but because it reflects a general failure of critical thinking across our society. The intellectual capacity required for a reasonable skepticism seems to be escaping a larger and larger swath of the populace, a swath which apparently now takes in those in important public safety roles. We're doomed.
Have you read up on some history recently? Witch burnings. Inquisitions. Holy wars. Mccarthyism. Geocentrism. Racism. Slavery. Feudalism. These aren't exactly a new phenomenon. To be honest, we're probably better off now than we've ever been before, and we've made it this far. I'm not terribly worried.
There is some very interesting research that indicates even the tens of thousands of years of farming prior to the industrial revolution may have altered global climate significantly enough to be detected.
Interesting, I have not heard of this. I'm not denying your claim, I'd genuinely like to see this research. Could you point me to some sources (or at least relevant search terms)?
Self-taught programmers might not know design patterns by name, but they will likely stumble upon the more common ones on their own. When they finally learn about design patterns, they will understand the topic better because they "invented" some of the design patterns themselves. That's how it was for me at least. One day I was explaining something to another programmer, and after my long explanation he just looked at me and said "Oh, so you're using the visitor pattern." I tilted my head, went online, and learned a new name for something I had been using for years.
If you fly to Australia (presumably from the U.S. and not from NZ or something) and need your laptop the whole time, invest in an airline power adaptor and check to see if your airline has connectors here. Or you know... buy a different laptop.
According to the site that you linked:
[...]because of the limited amount of power draw per seat, it is possible that your laptop won't get enough power to both operate and charge. Some airlines, like Continental Airlines, specifically state that battery charging is not allowed and ask you to remove your rechargeable battery from your device.
So if you plan to use the laptop on flights, buying a different laptop certainly seems like the way to go, here. Then again, if you plan to use a laptop on an airplane, you probably aren't looking at a 17" model, anyway.;-)
If the BBC author "knows what it does," he and other journalists would stop referring to Pirate Bay as a "file-sharing site." Use of that term is tantamount to referring to O.J. Simpson during his murder trial as "The murderer O.J. Simpson."
I disagree. Unlike murder, "file-sharing" is not inherently illegal. And TPB definitely allows the uploading and downloading -- i.e. "sharing" -- of.torrent files.
Dammit Palm, you had a complete market cornered, why did you have to drop the ball so stupidly?
If you had developed a decent OS (with a f**kin filesystem!) for your devices 5 years ago, you would still be relevant today...
It's even more sad than you think. They actually bought one -- BeOS. But even though they had an excellent OS with an excellent filesystem, they never bothered to do anything with it.
Firewire is actually fairly common on even budget PC notebooks, including Dells, so this omission by Apple is all the more perplexing. And Apple still doesn't offer Blu-ray drives or 3G wireless at any price on any model. (No 3G wireless option from the iPhone company!)
I'm fairly sure that's a form-factor issue. The Macbooks are pretty cramped for space. Function follows form these days.
It also amazes me that their latest hardware refresh still caps RAM at 4G maximum. Even Dell has figured out how to go to 8G max on a notebook.
4 GB DDR3 modules for laptops don't exist yet.
That said, there is some great design in these new MacBooks. But Apple engineers waxing eloquently about "unibody" construction (it isn't, by the way) when they forgot the damn Firewire port is a bit too much to stomach.
see above about form factor limitations. They wanted it small and pretty, so "big" things like firewire controller chips had to go.
I completely agree with the gist of your points, but I do want to point out one interesting tidbit that isn't getting a lot of attention:
The pork incentives to get those last dozen votes, frankly, sucks, but as Barney Frank pointed out: if you don't want politics in this process, you shouldn't hand it over to 535 politicians.
In all technicality, the bailout proposal was added to the pork incentives -- those were in a bill that had already passed the House. The Senate tacked the bailout proposal on as an amendment to that bill. They did that because it was the only legal way the Senate could propose that legislation.
So, for what it's worth, the "pork incentives" were probably already on their way to law.
When they can isolate the "Bing" moment (the point at which neurological function gives rise to experiential phenomenon) then we can put down the idea of a soul entirely, not before.
From a scientific perspective, sure. But from a religious perspective, it wouldn't mean a thing.
After all, the soul is already an unmeasurable entity accepted on faith. That's how religions thrive -- create an untestable set of claims to be accepted and acted upon, and convince people to accept the claim through emotional experiences and reactions.
The idea of a soul is not going anywhere for a very long time.
I've been curious... if there was an incredibly advanced civilization that was capable of building near perfect dyson spheres around large expanses of space absorbing essentially all the radiation of the stars within it, wouldn't that look like "dark matter"?
Nice, that's one of the more creative ideas I've heard in a while.
However, if the sphere absorbs the radiation of the stars inside of it, then the sphere will itself become heated and radiate back the energy it absorbs. It has been a while since I've taken thermal physics, but I'm fairly confident that an object that absorbs that much energy would be quite radiant, itself -- just in different wavelengths.
Wow. Your post is painfully accurate, down to the last detail. I don't have too much to add, but here's an amusing anecdote:
While it's been nearly 5 years since I toiled in COBOL, I can assure you that much of the information infastructure you deal with on a daily basis still runs on legacy mainframe hardware with COBOL programs being fed your charge card data, airline reservations, utility usage, pharmaceutical claim adjudications, etc....
My current company (which is *very* large) still runs mainframe code written by our *previous* CTO from his first entry-level position, decades ago.
It can't be that intractable; Firefox and GNOME have excellent usability.
Their solution to your stated problem is simple: find people interested in coding free software, and find other people interested in aesthetics and usability, and make them work together.
If the coder is uninterested in usability, and unwilling to bend to the usability experts, his project probably won't go anywhere; if it really is useful, it will be forked by a better managed team.
I'd read that the 360 had certain component(s) designed by Microsoft in-house (as a cost-saving measure), which had lousy thermal characteristics, and which they sought the help of nVidia to rectify. I'm unable to find a reference at this time, but I do believe my statement to be true, whether or not the GPU in the 360 is an ATI part.
I don't think so -- from what I've read, Nvidia's management has been very cold towards MS ever since the Xbox/DX9/GeforceFX debacle, where MS withheld DX9 specifications from NVidia in an attempt to force Nvidia to lower its price on XBox GPUs.
IIRC, this was one of the reasons Nvidia refused to provide MS with chips for the Xbox 360.
So I very much doubt Nvidia would help MS improve the 360, especially since Nvidia supplies parts for the PS3.
Back in 2003, when rumors were circulating about an AMD "K9" processor, everyone thought that a new, revolutionary, designed from the ground up processor architecture was in the works. Actually, it was. AMD was designing an *8-issue superscalar OoOE* 64-bit x86 processor. Basically the Alpha EV8 reincarnated in the form of an x86 chip. ( remember that AMD inherited a substantial portion of the Alpha design team after DEC was swalloed up by Compaq )
Unfortunately, as usual, management could only see 6-months ahead and the chip was canceled in favour of a 64-bit processor that was cheaper and easier to design and consequently would increase short-term revenue.
No, they canceled it because it was over-ambitious and couldn't work. The thermals of the design were impossible to manage, and the frequency scaling was predicted to be horrible.
No halfway-successful CPU company thinks "6 months down the road" like you claim. CPUs take years to design, tape-out, and manufacture, and CPU company management knows this.
The processor that was hailed as a "revolutionary" x86 design, the Opteron, was, in fact, *directly* based off of the *K7* design. It was basically a K7 with a beefed up datapath, support for SSE2 and other miscellany, an on-board memory controller, and a high speed serial point-to-point interconnect as a replacement for the front side bus ( Hypertransport ) bolted on.
... not to mention AMD64, a new ISA based on x86 -- something Intel wrote off as "impossible".
It includes 2x the number of GPRs (from 8 to 16), and eliminates tons of legacy cruft instructions from x86.
The "mode switching" behavior that allows K8 to switch between 32bit and 64bit modes on the fly is pretty impressive, as well.
So, while AMD basically did nothing essentially new with their architecture over the years, it gave Intel ample time to design, *from the ground up*, 5 new processor architectures : The Pentium-M, Core, Core 2, Nehalem, and Atom.
AMD's worst mistake was the cancellation of the Alpha EV8 inspired "K9" in 2003. Now they are paying for it.
jdb2
What the fuck? Pentium-M, Core, Core 2, etc are not "revolutionary, from the ground up" architectures. In fact, the basic architecture, when you boil it down, is nothing more than a "very beefed up" P6 -- AKA Pentium Pro -- which predates even K7.
I don't disagree that K9 is a disappointing warm-over of K8, but truely "new" cpu architectures don't come around all that often. Power6 is "beefed up" Power5, which is "beefed up" Power4, etc. A good architecture can last a very long time, and it's wasteful and dangerous to throw out a proven design for an unproven "new" design -- see NetBurst for an excellent example.
Slashdot Mirror
Ultimately, of course, this is all just a bunch of people being brave in hindsight. We know that guns are effective at deterring normal crimes, however an insane shooter obviously offers a different problem. At some point a shooter is going to run up against an armed citizen, and then we'll find out for sure just how effective they will be. Hopefully that armed citizen is responsible and capable of using their weapon effectively and are not just carrying around a gun to feel safe.
There are many incidents where an armed victim defeats unarmed or armed criminals. Here is one school shooting that was stopped by armed students:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_School_of_Law_shooting
Unfortunately, the only incidents of pistols vs body armor + rifles ended poorly for the pistol users.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_courthouse_shooting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout
FWIW, I do believe guns can be, and are, legitimately useful in self defense; however, in the scenario of pistol vs body armor + rifle, the pistol user is at a very, very serious disadvantage that can only be overcome by a very high level of still and a good dash of luck.
I don't know where you've got your info on firearms, but you are wildly inaccurate.
1. There are no ceramic parts in a Glock 17.
2. The Glock 17 is not called a "parabellum". The 9mmx19 round is often called "9mm parabellum" or "9mm luger", and the Glock 17 is chambered in "9mm parabellum". However, "parabellum" is not a common nickname for the Glock 17 itself.
3. Tenifer is a surface treatment to protect the steel from wear and corrosion. It has no effect of the compressibility of the steel as a whole. Please read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenifer
While I don't know the exact composition of regular jet fuel, I'm pretty sure it is just as combustible as pure hydrogen if not more so.
Actually, when I was researching the hydrogen-powered design predecessor to the U2 (the Lockeed CL 400), I came across some Air Force tests on the combustibility of liquid hydrogen in spill tests, as a safety concern. It turned out that spilled liquid hydrogen was less combustible than kerosene, as the evaporating hydrogen dissipated too quickly to ignite.
At UF, there are (were?) CS degrees offered though Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as the College of Engineering. I chose the former, as it was an easier administrative change from Physics.
I've also used it on a number of occasions (including some time in Sierra Leone), and I've only had mild side effects (some very, very strange dreams). However, I have seen others react very poorly, too. One of my friends contracted malaria and mono at the same time while in Guinea, and was dosed with massive quantities of lariam to treat it -- he had some serious psychological responses to it. Malaria really sucks, but so does this drug. BTW, when was your friend posted in Sierra Leone, and is he a Brit Para? I met a few of them when I was working for an NGO in Sierra Leone in 2001.
As naive as it may sound, why not just do less illegal stuff?
Who says they are doing illegal stuff? The government's alleging it, but in the ordinary course of events, the 5th Amendment is supposed to protect us against being required to give evidence against ourselves. We are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Call me naive, but I fail to see the problem with warranted searches. The 5th Amendment doesn't protect us from discovery. You can't physically prevent an officer with a warrant from searching your house. If you have a safe, and the police have a warrant, you *must* give them the key or face obstruction of justice. I fail to see the problem with that, or with being required to give the key to your virtual safe.
As annoying as that is, at least I understand the commercial desire to maximize profit.
Actually, they are minimizing profit. These cables are already licensed. The HDMI org have decided this cable does not meet its specifications, and is revoking the license. They are losing the licensing revenue they would otherwise gain from the sale of these cables.
If it was about contrails, most of you guys would still be wrong. Contrails aren't caused by the turbines, they're caused by the air passing the wingtips of the aircraft. If you want to learn more, there's wikipedia for that.
Ironic, considering the tone of your post, but I actually *did* look up (and read) the contrails article on Wikipedia, and you are in fact very wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Contrail&oldid=436631379
Contrails (play /kntrelz/; short for "condensation trails") or vapour trails are artificial clouds that are the visible trails of condensed water vapour made by the exhaust of aircraft engines. As the hot exhaust gases cool in the surrounding air they may precipitate a cloud of microscopic water droplets. If the air is cold enough, this trail will be comprised of tiny ice crystals.[1]
The wingtip vortices which trail from the wingtips and wing flaps of aircraft are sometimes partly visible due to condensation in the cores of the vortices. Each vortex is a mass of spinning air and the air pressure at the centre of the vortex is very low. These wingtip vortices are not the same as contrails.
Considering the corruption that has been rampant in the UN, I think it is good we are keeping tabs on how our tax money given to the UN as dues is *actually* spent.
I find it hard to consider the Negative Income Tax a "left" idea. Even Milton Friedman was a proponent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
How uneducated can you get?
Very, but they still get to vote. Three guesses as to which way "they" lean.
Hmmm.... I'm guessing the opposite of the way you lean?
Seriously, I want to laugh (and I do) but this (TFA and the sprinkler idiot) is troubling. Not just because these cops are stupid, but because it reflects a general failure of critical thinking across our society. The intellectual capacity required for a reasonable skepticism seems to be escaping a larger and larger swath of the populace, a swath which apparently now takes in those in important public safety roles. We're doomed.
Have you read up on some history recently? Witch burnings. Inquisitions. Holy wars. Mccarthyism. Geocentrism. Racism. Slavery. Feudalism. These aren't exactly a new phenomenon. To be honest, we're probably better off now than we've ever been before, and we've made it this far. I'm not terribly worried.
There is some very interesting research that indicates even the tens of thousands of years of farming prior to the industrial revolution may have altered global climate significantly enough to be detected.
Interesting, I have not heard of this. I'm not denying your claim, I'd genuinely like to see this research. Could you point me to some sources (or at least relevant search terms)?
Self-taught programmers might not know design patterns by name, but they will likely stumble upon the more common ones on their own. When they finally learn about design patterns, they will understand the topic better because they "invented" some of the design patterns themselves. That's how it was for me at least. One day I was explaining something to another programmer, and after my long explanation he just looked at me and said "Oh, so you're using the visitor pattern." I tilted my head, went online, and learned a new name for something I had been using for years.
This has been my experience as well. Finally, a good friend of mine handed me the "gang of four" design patterns text, and it has been invaluable, both in coding and in interviewing. :) http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/0201633612
If you fly to Australia (presumably from the U.S. and not from NZ or something) and need your laptop the whole time, invest in an airline power adaptor and check to see if your airline has connectors here. Or you know... buy a different laptop.
According to the site that you linked:
[...]because of the limited amount of power draw per seat, it is possible that your laptop won't get enough power to both operate and charge. Some airlines, like Continental Airlines, specifically state that battery charging is not allowed and ask you to remove your rechargeable battery from your device.
So if you plan to use the laptop on flights, buying a different laptop certainly seems like the way to go, here. Then again, if you plan to use a laptop on an airplane, you probably aren't looking at a 17" model, anyway. ;-)
If the BBC author "knows what it does," he and other journalists would stop referring to Pirate Bay as a "file-sharing site." Use of that term is tantamount to referring to O.J. Simpson during his murder trial as "The murderer O.J. Simpson."
I disagree. Unlike murder, "file-sharing" is not inherently illegal. And TPB definitely allows the uploading and downloading -- i.e. "sharing" -- of .torrent files.
Dammit Palm, you had a complete market cornered, why did you have to drop the ball so stupidly? If you had developed a decent OS (with a f**kin filesystem!) for your devices 5 years ago, you would still be relevant today...
It's even more sad than you think. They actually bought one -- BeOS. But even though they had an excellent OS with an excellent filesystem, they never bothered to do anything with it.
Firewire is actually fairly common on even budget PC notebooks, including Dells, so this omission by Apple is all the more perplexing. And Apple still doesn't offer Blu-ray drives or 3G wireless at any price on any model. (No 3G wireless option from the iPhone company!)
I'm fairly sure that's a form-factor issue. The Macbooks are pretty cramped for space. Function follows form these days.
It also amazes me that their latest hardware refresh still caps RAM at 4G maximum. Even Dell has figured out how to go to 8G max on a notebook.
4 GB DDR3 modules for laptops don't exist yet.
That said, there is some great design in these new MacBooks. But Apple engineers waxing eloquently about "unibody" construction (it isn't, by the way) when they forgot the damn Firewire port is a bit too much to stomach.
see above about form factor limitations. They wanted it small and pretty, so "big" things like firewire controller chips had to go.
I think that they wanted $0.25 per end-user.
I don't think so. I think they just couldn't fit the firewire chip onto the board.
Look here.
That's pretty packed. Where would they have put it?
I completely agree with the gist of your points, but I do want to point out one interesting tidbit that isn't getting a lot of attention:
The pork incentives to get those last dozen votes, frankly, sucks, but as Barney Frank pointed out: if you don't want politics in this process, you shouldn't hand it over to 535 politicians.
In all technicality, the bailout proposal was added to the pork incentives -- those were in a bill that had already passed the House. The Senate tacked the bailout proposal on as an amendment to that bill. They did that because it was the only legal way the Senate could propose that legislation.
So, for what it's worth, the "pork incentives" were probably already on their way to law.
When they can isolate the "Bing" moment (the point at which neurological function gives rise to experiential phenomenon) then we can put down the idea of a soul entirely, not before.
From a scientific perspective, sure. But from a religious perspective, it wouldn't mean a thing.
After all, the soul is already an unmeasurable entity accepted on faith. That's how religions thrive -- create an untestable set of claims to be accepted and acted upon, and convince people to accept the claim through emotional experiences and reactions.
The idea of a soul is not going anywhere for a very long time.
I've been curious... if there was an incredibly advanced civilization that was capable of building near perfect dyson spheres around large expanses of space absorbing essentially all the radiation of the stars within it, wouldn't that look like "dark matter"?
Nice, that's one of the more creative ideas I've heard in a while.
However, if the sphere absorbs the radiation of the stars inside of it, then the sphere will itself become heated and radiate back the energy it absorbs. It has been a while since I've taken thermal physics, but I'm fairly confident that an object that absorbs that much energy would be quite radiant, itself -- just in different wavelengths.
Wow. Your post is painfully accurate, down to the last detail. I don't have too much to add, but here's an amusing anecdote:
While it's been nearly 5 years since I toiled in COBOL, I can assure you that much of the information infastructure you deal with on a daily basis still runs on legacy mainframe hardware with COBOL programs being fed your charge card data, airline reservations, utility usage, pharmaceutical claim adjudications, etc....
My current company (which is *very* large) still runs mainframe code written by our *previous* CTO from his first entry-level position, decades ago.
It can't be that intractable; Firefox and GNOME have excellent usability.
Their solution to your stated problem is simple: find people interested in coding free software, and find other people interested in aesthetics and usability, and make them work together.
If the coder is uninterested in usability, and unwilling to bend to the usability experts, his project probably won't go anywhere; if it really is useful, it will be forked by a better managed team.
I'd read that the 360 had certain component(s) designed by Microsoft in-house (as a cost-saving measure), which had lousy thermal characteristics, and which they sought the help of nVidia to rectify. I'm unable to find a reference at this time, but I do believe my statement to be true, whether or not the GPU in the 360 is an ATI part.
I don't think so -- from what I've read, Nvidia's management has been very cold towards MS ever since the Xbox/DX9/GeforceFX debacle, where MS withheld DX9 specifications from NVidia in an attempt to force Nvidia to lower its price on XBox GPUs.
IIRC, this was one of the reasons Nvidia refused to provide MS with chips for the Xbox 360.
So I very much doubt Nvidia would help MS improve the 360, especially since Nvidia supplies parts for the PS3.
Back in 2003, when rumors were circulating about an AMD "K9" processor, everyone thought that a new, revolutionary, designed from the ground up processor architecture was in the works. Actually, it was. AMD was designing an *8-issue superscalar OoOE* 64-bit x86 processor. Basically the Alpha EV8 reincarnated in the form of an x86 chip. ( remember that AMD inherited a substantial portion of the Alpha design team after DEC was swalloed up by Compaq )
Unfortunately, as usual, management could only see 6-months ahead and the chip was canceled in favour of a 64-bit processor that was cheaper and easier to design and consequently would increase short-term revenue.
No, they canceled it because it was over-ambitious and couldn't work. The thermals of the design were impossible to manage, and the frequency scaling was predicted to be horrible.
No halfway-successful CPU company thinks "6 months down the road" like you claim. CPUs take years to design, tape-out, and manufacture, and CPU company management knows this.
The processor that was hailed as a "revolutionary" x86 design, the Opteron, was, in fact, *directly* based off of the *K7* design. It was basically a K7 with a beefed up datapath, support for SSE2 and other miscellany, an on-board memory controller, and a high speed serial point-to-point interconnect as a replacement for the front side bus ( Hypertransport ) bolted on.
The "mode switching" behavior that allows K8 to switch between 32bit and 64bit modes on the fly is pretty impressive, as well.
So, while AMD basically did nothing essentially new with their architecture over the years, it gave Intel ample time to design, *from the ground up*, 5 new processor architectures : The Pentium-M, Core, Core 2, Nehalem, and Atom.
AMD's worst mistake was the cancellation of the Alpha EV8 inspired "K9" in 2003. Now they are paying for it.
jdb2
What the fuck? Pentium-M, Core, Core 2, etc are not "revolutionary, from the ground up" architectures. In fact, the basic architecture, when you boil it down, is nothing more than a "very beefed up" P6 -- AKA Pentium Pro -- which predates even K7.
I don't disagree that K9 is a disappointing warm-over of K8, but truely "new" cpu architectures don't come around all that often. Power6 is "beefed up" Power5, which is "beefed up" Power4, etc. A good architecture can last a very long time, and it's wasteful and dangerous to throw out a proven design for an unproven "new" design -- see NetBurst for an excellent example.