And it's already licensed, and TI will also have an ARM Cortex A9 license, and probably already have a license for whatever is coming after that.

These licenses will not be reversible.

And as the A9, etc, will be viable for a good two or three years in SoC designs, there will be plenty of time for the SoC manufacturers to invest in MIPS based systems for future designs. In addition MIPS already has a 64-bit variant, Android has been ported, etc.

In addition Qualcomm and Marvell have architecture licenses, so they can continue to create their own versions of their ARM cores, improving clock speeds and features.

Both with Privacy AND with security.

I mean, from a business standpoint, yes, facebook is great for drumming up marketting, developing business, and maintaining relations with clients. However, just yesterday we ran across this little gem. A worm that targets facebook and other social networking sites specifically.

Surprise Surprise, one our sales ladies got infected. Now that we've cleaned it off we still have to assess the damage. She could have spread it to the rest of the sales team, her clients, the CEO (who is on her friends list)... But of course she isn't going to give US any information, that'd be invading her privacy.

I know, you guys are going to say "Tell her to warn others and let her deal with it then", which is what we did, but obviously if she doesn't adequately deal with it, the problem is going to circle back to us with other sales people.

Being able to control who gets to use the processors (and, more importantly, who doesn't) would give Apple a huge advantage over it's competitors

Apple would get crucified if they so much as tried to execute that kind of control, for one. For another, ARM isn't the only one who makes ARM-compatible CPUs: there's still Qualcomm, Samsung and more. This line is flamebait.

Apple is likely doing this to ensure consistent supply. It was depressingly common during the PowerPC era for Apple to suffer supply shortages whenever IBM or Motoroal botched estimates, diverted resources to it's own POWER machines (in IBM's case) and/or didn't feel like investing capital in manufacturing. When Apple is launching ARM-based products in half-million-in-one-week quantities, they probably don't want repeats of, say, what happened with many PPC G4 ,machines.

Gaining an advantage over your competitors is *not* grounds for anti-trust. Once again, I see "A monopoly on high quality" or "A monopoly on something I want" being thrown around as grounds for government intervention. Fortunately, the law isn't that idiotic - just random Internet commenters.

Apple has nowhere near a monopoly on chip design, mobile devices or computing. There are plenty of competitors to ARM in the low power chip market. The shareholders of these two companies are well within their rights to agree a takeover. Buying something so your competitors can't use it is a perfectly legitimate business action - if it wasn't, huge swathes of company takeover in existence would be "blocked on antitrust grounds".

I've definitely got some stuff gathering dust in places in my house. The thing is, every damn time I dump or recycle an item, it turns out I need it shortly thereafter. It's never the stuff that I'm keeping. Only the stuff that I get rid of. Grrr.

A corollary to this: the best way to avoid ever breaking something is to have a spare.

Crap! I wish more of my clients used McAfee!