Why would it make a difference? If you are a loyal Ford/Benz/Honda/etc. owner, and you found out the company was switching the type of engine used, would you look elsewhere?
You will ask yourself: 1) Will it be as reliable as the old type of engine? 2) Will it get at least as good fuel efficiency as the old type of engine?
You don't buy a car based on the type of engine it uses. You buy a car based on what it consumes (type and quantity of fuel), and what it produces (locomotion).
Computers are purchased the same way. The question is more about how smoothly the transition will be made, than it is about Intel processors. New model year cars generally have more hiccups than the 2nd or 3rd year. I can only imagine this will be the same way. Doesn't stop people from buying new model cars though.
It is a little unclear by the title, but the article is refering to a layered PCB, not silicon wafers. The diagrams show how they are attaching a flip chip assembly to a multi-layered PCB. The process in the document goes on to describe how the layers of the "green sheet" are processed and sandwiched together.
This layered wafer technology is totally different.
Then you might be talking about hurting linux market share. It would mostly hurt RedHat, and would do so by targetting buyers of commercial software for Linux. If I was Apple I would only be marginally interested in getting the OSS developer running on a Mac.
I work at a company that delivers Linux based engineering apps. All of our competition does as well. Our customers buy RHEL instead of installing SUSE or Debian or whatever. Why? Because that's what we support. Same goes for our competition. RedHat has done a good job at getting buy in from developers of commercial software for Linux.
Now, release OS X on x86 and add RedHat EL compatibility. You very well might get my customer's interest. These aren't your low end cheap hardware users. These are users that have moved away from Sun Workstations to get better price/performance. Even when running Linux they are buying $6000-$20,000 boxes, they need beefy boxes.
Apple will have a hard time breaking into the engineering market if they sit back and say, port your software to OS X. But if they say they are RHEL compatible, then there is no porting to do. They may just grab some customers, which are already accustomed to expensive hardware. Ultimately in this market, higher performance machines would grab some business. They might also get some converts that like an easier to maintain system.
If you would have read something besides the Slashdot title before posting you would have discovered that Steve Job's entire keynote presentation at the WWDC was done using a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 equipped computer running Mac OX 10.4, and all of the Apple applications. Keynote, iTunes, iPhoto, Quicktime, Safari, and quite a few other Apple apps. He also demoed Microsoft Office and Mathmatica on that machine.
So yes, they are using x86. What you are also apparently unaware of is that Intel caved under pressure from AMD, and is now producing and selling EM64T systems. Which are otherwise known as AMD64 compatible chips from Intel. They work, I've used them, and I know quite a few other people using them. They are not moving to Itanium.
You are correct that the port to 64 bit will be more work, and it is likely that they have yet to complete that. Job's made reference that the port to Intel wasn't complete, but his demo worked well . So obviously they have 32bit x86 working well. He stated as such, saying the OS X has been compiled and tested on x86 for the last 5 years. Just in case.
You're point is accurate, but I wouldn't dismiss the importance of >4GB memory access. I would venture that the >4GB memory access is more important to Apple than the Windows market.
Apple's customer base consists of a larger percentage of video editors and Photoshop users than Windows users do. Not that Windows doesn't have these customers, but they make up a smaller percentage of the total Windows PC market. These users buy the premium products, paying top dollar. Apple cannot afford to lose them to a 64 Windows machine.
When your using something like Final Cut Pro (http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/) every Gigabyte of memory helps. So does that liquid cooled CPU.
The only reason this gets press is because it's some BIG SCARY BUSINESS INTEREST sueing a _poor little kid_. These articles get posted because someone wants to enflame the rage of all the illegal file swappers against the RIAA. The RIAA is just following through with there legal right.
There are an awful lot of people who seem to think that if they don't like the law, they'll just ignore it. Then when the law comes back to bite them they get angry that its unfair. Well, maybe they should've lobbied to get the law changed before breaking it!
I'm no fan of the RIAA, they are so stuck in the stone age they don't see a good opportunity staring them in the face. But they are going to do, what they are going to do. And if you don't like it, follow the law or change it.
What a horribly written article, it says precisely NOTHING. Anyone have a link to something with more detail than, "rather than building up and tossing away unwanted information, the chips "uncompute" it fluidly?"
Uncompute? This does NOT compute!
How about something that describes information like:
1) Is this a transistor based circuit? If so, it's a far cry from todays traditional CMOS structures. 2) How do they plan to charge and discharge the transistor/capacitors/whatever in a way that conserves energy?
I don't know that the point is abundance is bad, but that abundance will likely have unintended consequences.
Sure, the first things a new technology does is have its intended consequences. After that however, if the "cost" to do something is dramatically reduced unintended consequences occur.
I don't know if the guy is a luddite or not, but his point valid. If you introduce a technology that dramatically reduces the cost to do something, it's probably guaranteed that additional consequences will occur besides the original reason why you invented the technology in the first place.
It may be wise to try to think through what those consequences might be. Once you've done that, you've got several options:
1) Don't release the technology (Boring) 2) Control the release, so society has time to adjust. 3) Introduce something that acts a counter balance, so the undesired consequences don't occur or are minimized. 4) Screw it, and just roll out the new thing already!
#1 - There so many reasons this is wrong, I won't go into it. #2 - This almost never happens, maybe it should? I don't know #3 - If strategy #3 was rolled out with a technology in the first place, things would probably go smoother. #4 - This is what happens today, until eventually we go ooops (or somebody like the RIAA applies a lot of self-interested political pressure), and then we try to do #3 after the fact. This sometimes gets ugly.
But when all is said and done. #4 just pushes societal evolution. A disturbance enters or society; we struggle with it for 10-100 years; finally equilibrium is established around that new technology; rinse repeat.
#4 has actually worked great up until the industrial revolution. Since then the pace of innovation has been so great, that we don't have time to finish adjusting to the last change before we have to start adjusting to a new one.
That in itself is applying pressure on society to change. It is applying a pressure for society to become quickly adaptable.
So here's a piece for you to nibble on. What's more quickly adaptable? A democratic society or a totalitarian? I certainly prefer my good ol' democracy, but P.R.China has a government structure more like a corporation than Western countries. It can force painful societal adaptiations to occur quickly. Totalitarian governments can fail by being to rigid, too. But if they find the right mix of control, combined with encouraging a free market, they make a formidable force.
Might it be that democracy will fail, because it can't adapt to technological change fast enough? Time will tell.
I'd venture that a lot of those inkjets people want to get rid of are from the cheaper end of the spectrum. No matter the era, you get what you pay for. In this case, regardless of the price of the cartridge. When looking at inkjets set your minimum price to about $280 for light use consumer printers, or maybe something like $380 for a heavier duty/business higher use unit.
I've had an HP Photosmart 1000 for over 2 years now with no problems. This printer goes through a couple of idle months, followed by couple days of heavy photo printing. Runs like a champ. Of course cartridge prices are a little high, but printers with dedicated black cartidges are a lot more economical to run that ones without. Given the amount of printing I do, it's still more affordable than laser.
I think you'll have a hard time buying a color laser in the price range your looking for. If your willing to pony up the cash, today's color lasers are really nice and the way to go. If you are going to do a lot of printing, the laser will be cheaper in the long run.
Distributing copyrighted source code, but not using an OSS license. Followed by waiting for hackers to encorporate said code. Followed by waiting for money-bags company to majorly adopt said technology. Followed by sueing for copyright infringment to profit from said infringement.
I wouldn't mind licensing this business method patent for a reasonable $100,000. But for using it unlicensed, I'll sue your ass to the tune of $3 billion dollars! Muh, Ah, Ahhh, Muh, Ah, Ahhh!
By the way. I've patented waiting for a patent violation before trying to collect too. Muh, Ah, Ahhhhhhh!
>>Stopping business - absurd. I thought the 8 years before Bush were going pretty damn well.
Yeah, if you sold before all the cooked books were uncovered. The boom during those eight years was all falsly based on cooked books. If you want to give Clinton credit for basing an economy on falsified business records, then go ahead. I guess.
FYI, the stock market is a joke. Any "real" ties between stock value and the company itself have long since been removed. But I'm still invested. Why? Most of the other idiots don't understand that. If you understand that the market is purely based on speculative emotion, then at least you know what you're getting into.
>>School vouchers - I'm for school vouchers. Are liberals (democrats?) against them?
I've seen an interesting mix. It seems that many Democratic politicians have been against the vouchers, but poor neighborhoods (typically Democratic neighborhoods) are pro-voucher. Apparently the teachers union has too much clout. The NEA has been pretty consistantly against vouchers, since it potentially moves money away from public schools.
>>The thought of a country run by the old guard of the GOP without anyone even trying to keep them honest is a frightening thought
Technologically you are sound. Market-wise it is not practical. Take HDTV.
Problem: There is no defined standard yet (aside from broadcast). Studios will be slow to adopt HD production unless there is a large market of HD viewers, who won't upgrade unless it's cheap and has a lot of HD programming. Chicken/egg.
Solution: slowly seed the market. Convert early adopters on both fronts.
Problem: even they won't adopt if they think their new hardware will be obsolete soon.
Solution: you need to standardize on the a spec, or allow them to upgrade.
Problem: if the spec is marketed incorrectly or not very good, or there are competing standards, hardware developers don't want to create hardware for it.
Solution: Somebody needs to force the standard. Enter Congress.
Problem: Congress doesn't act because various producers and consumers want different things. The standard never happens because of this. Since the standard never comes, hardware makers never create HD devices. Even the early adopters don't get to adopt. Deadlock.
Solution: Hardware makers create upgradeable devices able to handle any changing standards. We now don't have to wait for "An Act of Congress" to get HD. Early adopters on both the producer and consumer side will start playing with the technologies. Through the sometimes painful process of survival of the fittest, some kind of standard will emerge victorious. It won't be perfect, but the alternative is deadlock.
There is an alternate version of this scenario. Congress does pass a standard. It is so bad nobody wants it, and is ignored.
Ignored because: 1) it's too vague or allows too many variations 2) favors one lobbying group too much 3) was never tested in the "real world" and won't really work 4) despite having a deadline for compliance, because of 1-3 is repealed before anyone actually has to do anything about it.
I work in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. I've developed and supported both FPGAs and ASICs (think high performance non-FPGA) engineering efforts. FPGA products frequently can fall prey to a couple problems.
1) Using a pre-standardized specification because some marketing guy wants to be the first product to hit the street. This is a marketing and not an engineering problem.
2) For some reason there seams to be a lot of FPGA designers that don't think design verification with simulation is very important. Probably because FPGAs have historically been small simple devices, and now are becoming large and complex like ASICs. ASIC designers have developed sophisticated verification and simulation environments that really help reduce the number of bugs in large complex systems. The relatively simplistic and old fashioned verification methods of the FPGA designer tend to not thoroughly verify a design. In fact if you talk to these designers, they often say "Oh, all that simulation is too slow, and requires more work to develop all the test benches. I'll just download the FPGA program into the actual device, and run it on the real thing a thousand times faster." The faster part is true. Yet, this approach is usually far from thorough since a formal verification plan has not been created, and running on hardware lacks the visibility needed to do debug. Then bugs like you've seen make it into the product, and a patch has to be delivered to the customer later.
So there's nothing wrong with the FPGA. It's just the pressure to go to market too early, or inexperience engineers brushing off the idea of thorough verification.
I'd be all for a law that says all unsolicited advertising must originate from a.spam domain. US laws control the registrars of the.com domain, if not the content on those domains, correct? Then you fine any company $100 per email for companies within the law's jurisdiction, and warn.com violators outside the jurisdiction. Repeat violators outside jurisdiction get their domain and IPs revoked.
Some may worry that this would be an unenforced law, like the junk fax legislation. But, corporations who have servers clogged with junk mail will be sure to take spammers to court, and to collect what may be substantial penalty fees.
The only people who should be concerned about the "sometimes your are the hog" issue, are people who 'are the hog' on average. If, on the average, you are 'not the hog', you won't get bit very badly. The biggest byte gobblers will pay the most.
I don't know why everyone complains about Microsoft. They're certainly doing their part to promote Linux. I wonder whose product MS's marketing thinks their promoting?
He better use a license that requires people the reuse the video to place a disclaimer that says this is not his original creation, and hence the content may have been modified to make him appear to espouse something he never intended to.
With some creative editing, I bet someone could make Bob look like a very big closed source, pro-Microsoft, anti-free software guy, if they wanted to. Or at the very least, make some video that makes him sound a little off his rocker, in an attempt to make people discredit anything else he has to say.
Well it's that time of year again, our annual membership drive. Only a small percentage of our users actually pay for the service, the rest of you are just freeloaders. Don't you want to end that guilty feeling you have? So get on the phone and call one of our volunteers now.
If you pledge at 20 Euro per month level you'll receive an RMS mug, featuring a picture of that zany and lovable guy that got this all started in the first place.
Pledge at the 100 Euro per month level and you become part of our Kernel Club. Not only will we send you the RMS mug, but you'll also receive the "Shove it up your *ss, Bill!" T-Shirt. A collectable that you'll surely enjoy, while being the envy of your cube farm. You'll also receive our monthly news letter, and discounts tickets to the next BierWanderung.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would it make a difference? If you are a loyal Ford/Benz/Honda/etc. owner, and you found out the company was switching the type of engine used, would you look elsewhere?
You will ask yourself:
1) Will it be as reliable as the old type of engine?
2) Will it get at least as good fuel efficiency as the old type of engine?
You don't buy a car based on the type of engine it uses. You buy a car based on what it consumes (type and quantity of fuel), and what it produces (locomotion).
Computers are purchased the same way. The question is more about how smoothly the transition will be made, than it is about Intel processors. New model year cars generally have more hiccups than the 2nd or 3rd year. I can only imagine this will be the same way. Doesn't stop people from buying new model cars though.
It is a little unclear by the title, but the article is refering to a layered PCB, not silicon wafers. The diagrams show how they are attaching a flip chip assembly to a multi-layered PCB. The process in the document goes on to describe how the layers of the "green sheet" are processed and sandwiched together.
This layered wafer technology is totally different.
Ahh, I can see it now.
Then you might be talking about hurting linux market share. It would mostly hurt RedHat, and would do so by targetting buyers of commercial software for Linux. If I was Apple I would only be marginally interested in getting the OSS developer running on a Mac.
I work at a company that delivers Linux based engineering apps. All of our competition does as well. Our customers buy RHEL instead of installing SUSE or Debian or whatever. Why? Because that's what we support. Same goes for our competition. RedHat has done a good job at getting buy in from developers of commercial software for Linux.
Now, release OS X on x86 and add RedHat EL compatibility. You very well might get my customer's interest. These aren't your low end cheap hardware users. These are users that have moved away from Sun Workstations to get better price/performance. Even when running Linux they are buying $6000-$20,000 boxes, they need beefy boxes.
Apple will have a hard time breaking into the engineering market if they sit back and say, port your software to OS X. But if they say they are RHEL compatible, then there is no porting to do. They may just grab some customers, which are already accustomed to expensive hardware. Ultimately in this market, higher performance machines would grab some business. They might also get some converts that like an easier to maintain system.
If you would have read something besides the Slashdot title before posting you would have discovered that Steve Job's entire keynote presentation at the WWDC was done using a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 equipped computer running Mac OX 10.4, and all of the Apple applications. Keynote, iTunes, iPhoto, Quicktime, Safari, and quite a few other Apple apps. He also demoed Microsoft Office and Mathmatica on that machine.
So yes, they are using x86. What you are also apparently unaware of is that Intel caved under pressure from AMD, and is now producing and selling EM64T systems. Which are otherwise known as AMD64 compatible chips from Intel. They work, I've used them, and I know quite a few other people using them. They are not moving to Itanium.
You are correct that the port to 64 bit will be more work, and it is likely that they have yet to complete that. Job's made reference that the port to Intel wasn't complete, but his demo worked well . So obviously they have 32bit x86 working well. He stated as such, saying the OS X has been compiled and tested on x86 for the last 5 years. Just in case.
You're point is accurate, but I wouldn't dismiss the importance of >4GB memory access. I would venture that the >4GB memory access is more important to Apple than the Windows market.
Apple's customer base consists of a larger percentage of video editors and Photoshop users than Windows users do. Not that Windows doesn't have these customers, but they make up a smaller percentage of the total Windows PC market. These users buy the premium products, paying top dollar. Apple cannot afford to lose them to a 64 Windows machine.
When your using something like Final Cut Pro (http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/) every Gigabyte of memory helps. So does that liquid cooled CPU.
"Another problem--we don't have wireless power yet."
Gosh, I wonder what powers my iPod then when it's not plugged in?
If this is a repeat of Netscape vs. Microsoft. It means two things.
1) Real is in a last gasp for survival, and this is all they have left.
2) The court case will drag out until Real is bankrupt and out of business, so this case doesn't really matter. It will be resolved too late.
Cheers!
Well said!!
:)
Now everyone repeat after me.
I am not a Victim!
I am not a Victim!
I am not a Victim!
I am not a Victim!
Politicians discovered that identifying YOU as a VICTIM plays well in the media. Arrrgh!
Say it again. I am not a Victim. Now start living that way!
"I am not a Victim" curtesy of Michael Medved
Not my point, I agree with you.
The only reason this gets press is because it's some BIG SCARY BUSINESS INTEREST sueing a _poor little kid_. These articles get posted because someone wants to enflame the rage of all the illegal file swappers against the RIAA. The RIAA is just following through with there legal right.
There are an awful lot of people who seem to think that if they don't like the law, they'll just ignore it. Then when the law comes back to bite them they get angry that its unfair. Well, maybe they should've lobbied to get the law changed before breaking it!
I'm no fan of the RIAA, they are so stuck in the stone age they don't see a good opportunity staring them in the face. But they are going to do, what they are going to do. And if you don't like it, follow the law or change it.
Why is this news? Sure its Goliath picking on David again, but what's new about that?
Here's a better question. Why complain about the RIAA doing what the RIAA does? Go change the law or do something productive.
Complaining about this is like complaining that lions kill antelope. Either kill the lion, kill the antelope, or put a fence between them!
Thanks. These links should've made up the original slashdot post. :)
What a horribly written article, it says precisely NOTHING. Anyone have a link to something with more detail than, "rather than building up and tossing away unwanted information, the chips "uncompute" it fluidly?"
Uncompute? This does NOT compute!
How about something that describes information like:
1) Is this a transistor based circuit? If so, it's a far cry from todays traditional CMOS structures.
2) How do they plan to charge and discharge the transistor/capacitors/whatever in a way that conserves energy?
I don't know that the point is abundance is bad, but that abundance will likely have unintended consequences.
Sure, the first things a new technology does is have its intended consequences. After that however, if the "cost" to do something is dramatically reduced unintended consequences occur.
I don't know if the guy is a luddite or not, but his point valid. If you introduce a technology that dramatically reduces the cost to do something, it's probably guaranteed that additional consequences will occur besides the original reason why you invented the technology in the first place.
It may be wise to try to think through what those consequences might be. Once you've done that, you've got several options:
1) Don't release the technology (Boring)
2) Control the release, so society has time to adjust.
3) Introduce something that acts a counter balance, so the undesired consequences don't occur or are minimized.
4) Screw it, and just roll out the new thing already!
#1 - There so many reasons this is wrong, I won't go into it.
#2 - This almost never happens, maybe it should? I don't know
#3 - If strategy #3 was rolled out with a technology in the first place, things would probably go smoother.
#4 - This is what happens today, until eventually we go ooops (or somebody like the RIAA applies a lot of self-interested political pressure), and then we try to do #3 after the fact. This sometimes gets ugly.
But when all is said and done. #4 just pushes societal evolution. A disturbance enters or society; we struggle with it for 10-100 years; finally equilibrium is established around that new technology; rinse repeat.
#4 has actually worked great up until the industrial revolution. Since then the pace of innovation has been so great, that we don't have time to finish adjusting to the last change before we have to start adjusting to a new one.
That in itself is applying pressure on society to change. It is applying a pressure for society to become quickly adaptable.
So here's a piece for you to nibble on. What's more quickly adaptable? A democratic society or a totalitarian? I certainly prefer my good ol' democracy, but P.R.China has a government structure more like a corporation than Western countries. It can force painful societal adaptiations to occur quickly. Totalitarian governments can fail by being to rigid, too. But if they find the right mix of control, combined with encouraging a free market, they make a formidable force.
Might it be that democracy will fail, because it can't adapt to technological change fast enough? Time will tell.
I'd venture that a lot of those inkjets people want to get rid of are from the cheaper end of the spectrum. No matter the era, you get what you pay for. In this case, regardless of the price of the cartridge. When looking at inkjets set your minimum price to about $280 for light use consumer printers, or maybe something like $380 for a heavier duty/business higher use unit.
I've had an HP Photosmart 1000 for over 2 years now with no problems. This printer goes through a couple of idle months, followed by couple days of heavy photo printing. Runs like a champ. Of course cartridge prices are a little high, but printers with dedicated black cartidges are a lot more economical to run that ones without. Given the amount of printing I do, it's still more affordable than laser.
I think you'll have a hard time buying a color laser in the price range your looking for. If your willing to pony up the cash, today's color lasers are really nice and the way to go. If you are going to do a lot of printing, the laser will be cheaper in the long run.
I own the patent on:
Distributing copyrighted source code, but not using an OSS license. Followed by waiting for hackers to encorporate said code. Followed by waiting for money-bags company to majorly adopt said technology. Followed by sueing for copyright infringment to profit from said infringement.
I wouldn't mind licensing this business method patent for a reasonable $100,000. But for using it unlicensed, I'll sue your ass to the tune of $3 billion dollars! Muh, Ah, Ahhh, Muh, Ah, Ahhh!
By the way. I've patented waiting for a patent violation before trying to collect too. Muh, Ah, Ahhhhhhh!
>>Stopping business - absurd. I thought the 8 years before Bush were going pretty damn well.
Yeah, if you sold before all the cooked books were uncovered. The boom during those eight years was all falsly based on cooked books. If you want to give Clinton credit for basing an economy on falsified business records, then go ahead. I guess.
FYI, the stock market is a joke. Any "real" ties between stock value and the company itself have long since been removed. But I'm still invested. Why? Most of the other idiots don't understand that. If you understand that the market is purely based on speculative emotion, then at least you know what you're getting into.
>>School vouchers - I'm for school vouchers. Are liberals (democrats?) against them?
I've seen an interesting mix. It seems that many Democratic politicians have been against the vouchers, but poor neighborhoods (typically Democratic neighborhoods) are pro-voucher. Apparently the teachers union has too much clout. The NEA has been pretty consistantly against vouchers, since it potentially moves money away from public schools.
>>The thought of a country run by the old guard of the GOP without anyone even trying to keep them honest is a frightening thought
Diddo for the Dems.
Technologically you are sound. Market-wise it is not practical. Take HDTV.
Problem: There is no defined standard yet (aside from broadcast). Studios will be slow to adopt HD production unless there is a large market of HD viewers, who won't upgrade unless it's cheap and has a lot of HD programming. Chicken/egg.
Solution: slowly seed the market. Convert early adopters on both fronts.
Problem: even they won't adopt if they think their new hardware will be obsolete soon.
Solution: you need to standardize on the a spec, or allow them to upgrade.
Problem: if the spec is marketed incorrectly or not very good, or there are competing standards, hardware developers don't want to create hardware for it.
Solution: Somebody needs to force the standard. Enter Congress.
Problem: Congress doesn't act because various producers and consumers want different things. The standard never happens because of this. Since the standard never comes, hardware makers never create HD devices. Even the early adopters don't get to adopt. Deadlock.
Solution: Hardware makers create upgradeable devices able to handle any changing standards. We now don't have to wait for "An Act of Congress" to get HD. Early adopters on both the producer and consumer side will start playing with the technologies. Through the sometimes painful process of survival of the fittest, some kind of standard will emerge victorious. It won't be perfect, but the alternative is deadlock.
There is an alternate version of this scenario. Congress does pass a standard. It is so bad nobody wants it, and is ignored.
Ignored because:
1) it's too vague or allows too many variations
2) favors one lobbying group too much
3) was never tested in the "real world" and won't really work
4) despite having a deadline for compliance, because of 1-3 is repealed before anyone actually has to do anything about it.
I work in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. I've developed and supported both FPGAs and ASICs (think high performance non-FPGA) engineering efforts. FPGA products frequently can fall prey to a couple problems.
1) Using a pre-standardized specification because some marketing guy wants to be the first product to hit the street. This is a marketing and not an engineering problem.
2) For some reason there seams to be a lot of FPGA designers that don't think design verification with simulation is very important. Probably because FPGAs have historically been small simple devices, and now are becoming large and complex like ASICs. ASIC designers have developed sophisticated verification and simulation environments that really help reduce the number of bugs in large complex systems. The relatively simplistic and old fashioned verification methods of the FPGA designer tend to not thoroughly verify a design. In fact if you talk to these designers, they often say "Oh, all that simulation is too slow, and requires more work to develop all the test benches. I'll just download the FPGA program into the actual device, and run it on the real thing a thousand times faster." The faster part is true. Yet, this approach is usually far from thorough since a formal verification plan has not been created, and running on hardware lacks the visibility needed to do debug. Then bugs like you've seen make it into the product, and a patch has to be delivered to the customer later.
So there's nothing wrong with the FPGA. It's just the pressure to go to market too early, or inexperience engineers brushing off the idea of thorough verification.
(G)NPCI is (N)ot (PCI)
I'd be all for a law that says all unsolicited advertising must originate from a .spam domain. US laws control the registrars of the .com domain, if not the content on those domains, correct? Then you fine any company $100 per email for companies within the law's jurisdiction, and warn .com violators outside the jurisdiction. Repeat violators outside jurisdiction get their domain and IPs revoked.
Some may worry that this would be an unenforced law, like the junk fax legislation. But, corporations who have servers clogged with junk mail will be sure to take spammers to court, and to collect what may be substantial penalty fees.
The only people who should be concerned about the "sometimes your are the hog" issue, are people who 'are the hog' on average. If, on the average, you are 'not the hog', you won't get bit very badly. The biggest byte gobblers will pay the most.
I don't know why everyone complains about Microsoft. They're certainly doing their part to promote Linux. I wonder whose product MS's marketing thinks their promoting?
He better use a license that requires people the reuse the video to place a disclaimer that says this is not his original creation, and hence the content may have been modified to make him appear to espouse something he never intended to.
With some creative editing, I bet someone could make Bob look like a very big closed source, pro-Microsoft, anti-free software guy, if they wanted to. Or at the very least, make some video that makes him sound a little off his rocker, in an attempt to make people discredit anything else he has to say.
Well it's that time of year again, our annual membership drive. Only a small percentage of our users actually pay for the service, the rest of you are just freeloaders. Don't you want to end that guilty feeling you have? So get on the phone and call one of our volunteers now.
If you pledge at 20 Euro per month level you'll receive an RMS mug, featuring a picture of that zany and lovable guy that got this all started in the first place.
Pledge at the 100 Euro per month level and you become part of our Kernel Club. Not only will we send you the RMS mug, but you'll also receive the "Shove it up your *ss, Bill!" T-Shirt. A collectable that you'll surely enjoy, while being the envy of your cube farm. You'll also receive our monthly news letter, and discounts tickets to the next BierWanderung.
So don't wake CALL NOW!