ARM chips since ARMv7 have supported the Thumb-2 instruction set, which has 32-bit instructions with CISC features like making an optional left shift available to most instruction, and allowing each comparison to be followed by up to four conditional statements. It's what most JIT and my compilers target now, IIRC.

It's absolutely true that it's Intel whom must the uphill battle here. The fact that many Android applications are compiled to DEX, and the emergence of HTML5 runtimes offer some relief. I still think that despite Intel's dominance of the desktop market, it faced an uphill fight in the server arena as well, where it was competing against OSes which generally did not (yet) run on IA, using Linux and Windows.

It's true that Intel hasn't achieved great success with it's own RISC designs, but what about the times that Intel competed using its CISC designs against:

• Alpha? (You mentioned Alpha as something that Intel threw out, no something that it competed against)
• SPARC?
• POWER?

It's also worth noting that all of the modern ARM-based SoCs that Medfield will compete against are CISC designs, not RISC, so I guess my list doesn't even matter :-/

Being ineligible for Pell Grants and government work is rough, but the Selective Service FAQ says that "a non-registrant may not be denied any benefit if he can 'show by a preponderance of evidence' that his failure to register was not knowing and willful." Maybe it wasn't always that way, but Wikipedia says that "there is a procedure to provide an 'information letter' by the SSS for those in these situations, for example recent citizens who entered the US after their 26th birthday."

You have a four-digit user ID, so you're probably too old to take advantage of this. That said, I do hope that by posting this I can raise awareness of the procedure so that other people don't lose eligibility.

Calling Global Foundries AMD's "long-time partner" really dates "MrSeb", he must have started reporting tech news in the last three years. Global Foundries isn't just a "partner" to AMD, it's part-owned by AMD, and was spun out of AMD's manufacturing and merged with Chartered Semiconductor.

Your description is also inaccurate. Instruction decode and L2 cache are shared between cores in Bulldozer modules as well; I wouldn't ding Bulldozer for the shared L2 cache but the L1 cache is write-through, and there doesn't seem to be enough cache bandwidth to keep both integer cores busy. Bulldozer is not a 3-issue design, it is a 4-issue design. With regards to Bulldozer's Achilles' heel, I think that its deficiency in single-threaded performance comes more from actual cache misses and latency than the smaller instruction window. I could be proven wrong by architectural studies that come out in the future. Either way, those studies will be interesting.

It's apparent from jobs.intel.com that Intel has a large appetite for employees who hold PhDs. Maybe they actually want more people to perform advanced research in semiconductors, computer science, and computer architecture, so they can hire those people? It certainly looks like they're willing to put their money where their appetite is. The "open source" provision is a no-brainier way of protecting themselves from having to pay royalties steaming from research they contribute to. At the very worst, it creates a barrier to entry (have to build their own lab) to other groups seeking to patent developments in those fields for exclusive use. I suppose it's possible that Intel is trying to limit the patentable research coming out of universities, but at least they're doing it with funding, and not political manipulations or lawsuits. Even in that case, research is funded and the fruits of that research become available to the public.

Why is everyone convinced that this is real? Is there some hard evidence that I don't know about? Any evidence indicating:

• The iPhone being an iPhone 5?
• That the people who say that got an email message from Apple really did get such a message?
• That Apple (or an authorized representative) really sent it?

Sneaking around isn't really Apple's modus operandi. If they reacted the way they did last time, this would look totally different, and they haven't given any kind of impression that they were unhappy with the way they handled it last time. If Apple decided to break the law instead of just calling the police (who appear willing to answer Apple's calls) and expose themselves to massive liability with a plan that was very unlikely to work (impersonate a cop and ask for the phone) then why wouldn't they just kick the guy's door in and threaten to shoot him in the head? Once he gave back the iPhone (if he had it) he wouldn't have any evidence to show that Apple threatened him, and if he did, he would probably be too wise to call them on it.

This whole thing screams fake. And tedious fake. It used to be that people in the media were suckered by better con artists than the ones walking around today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)

I was in either second or third grade when our classroom teacher showed us how to control LOGO, a programmable turtle that could be used to draw shapes. She put me on a carpet in the center of the room, with a ball of string to unwind in a trail behind myself. She told the class that they would use me to create a shape on the carpet, by telling me where to go.

She asked the class:

1. what shape to make
2. which way I should face to start making the shape (a square)
3. how far forward I should walk to make the first side
4. what I should do next
5. etc.

When the square was finished, she discussed how I had repeated some steps (turn 90 degrees, walk forward) and used that as an introduction to for loops. Next, she lead us to the conclusion that we could make a shape of N sides by having me turn 360 / N degrees. Last, she let the class figure out that they could have me approximate a circle with a high value of N.

This whole exercise took maybe two hours. We spent the rest of the afternoon in a lab, programming with Logo, in pairs. Don’t feel bad if you can’t lead a bunch of kids through basic programming and geometry before lunch, this woman was a genius teacher. Her class size was maybe 30. Looking back it’s clear that she must have used some form of mind control to keep us in line.

Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/722/ (Computer Problems)

Really? Was WAMU solvent or something?

I'm sorry, but creator tags were a huge PITA. You can still hide file extensions. And Pages has had a maximized mode for awhile - it's excellent. Sometimes mono-tasking really is the right approach and I'm glad that users get that option.

I do remember, Mad Magazine predicted it, too.

On a related note, my fiance has made me throw out many things, but I still cling to the issue of Maxim from 2000 where they predict that Osama Bin Laden will start World War III with a terrorist attack in New York City.

What happened to the "You're a kitty!" tag? I think it's very appropriate. For those who haven't seen it, XKCD's "Cat Proximity" http://xkcd.com/231/

I don't think that's the case. It is my understanding that those civilians weren't killed because they were hanging out with armed men, they were killed because their camera were mistaken for weapons.

From http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6344FW20100406:

I think that what many people are missing is that what Apple is offering is a proprietary implementation of open standards, vs a proprietary implementation of a closed standard. If Apple finds a problem in Safari, it can fix it. If it finds a problem with Flash, it can't. An iPhone owner who doesn't like Apple's implementations of HTML5 or IMAP can get a different smart phone. If he doesn't like Adobe's implementation of Flash, he's hosed.

From the renderings on their site, it looks like they still have the hard edges. At the risk of sound like an apologist, I changed my ergonomics a year ago so I I'm not resting my arms on the edge and my hards feel much better. I initially did that so I wouldn't break my new desktop keyboard tray, but I started doing it when using laptops as well.