Possible? Yes. Likely? That's somewhat less clear.

Did it include the build environment also, or just the raw source? Does the source match up with your chipset VERY closely (if not, do you have long road ahead)?

When compiling a Jasper Forest BIOS for example, there is:
1. Source for the Jasper Forest family of CPUs (which is different than the source for all other familes)
2. Source for any BIOS-supported ICs on the system which differ from Intel's reference design (perhaps you have a different super I/O, for example?)
3. A configurator which sets a ton of build options #define's. It has an integrated compiler as well
4. An Intel BIOS packaging tool which adds a few Intel proprietary things

The only one that I would guarantee to be universal is is #1: Different BIOS source for the different families of CPU's.

          Marc

Whatever it is you are babbling about, I strongly suspect the majority of the citizens of the United States are as responsible as anyone. But just to be clear, what EXACTLY are you trying to find a responsible party for on this witch hunt of yours? "the american economy has suffered"... that's a pretty broad stroke, as is "economic victory in Asia." Do you think there is someone to blame for Japan not participating in this "victory"? Same or different villan than is to blame for the US woes?

Marc

You're not missing anything - and I had the same thought about the Swiss ball. It is really too bad that they didn't take basic anti-static precautions - it really isn't hard at all. It's like wearing your seat belt...

Talk about a waste of water: parts of north Texas (and many other areas obviously), have clay soil which moves in crazy ways if allowed to dry out too much. This moves you house in crazy ways, causing cracks inside and out. The solution? We're encouraged to water our foundations. Huge amounts of water go to this, which results in our lake levels getting low, which puts us into water restrictions where we can't water the lawn.

Better solutions would be (1) build the foundations to withstand the soil moving, (2) and/or use a different method to keep the soil stable. I'm skipping (3) move elsewhere because DFW is not going to sprout legs and go take over Oklahoma. Unfortunately (2) likely suffers the same problem as the current solution of watering the foundation with soaker hoses: it's basically impossible to do it evenly... so you end up with overmoist areas, and other areas that still move some.

        Marc

Exactly right. We're designing a high-end router right now with 40 Gbps ports and the management CPUs are PPC based - just like all the other equipment we've designed (and all the other vendors too) for the past 15 years. In this case, one of the CPU's even runs Linux.

      Marc

It's funny reading all the responses saying "It's obvious"... and then each response gives a different cause.

If I knew then what I know now, I would probably not have gone into electrical engineering out of fear of offshoring. Thus far it hasn't completed killed engineering in the USA, but it has certainly made a big dent. But I don't know that the majority of young engineers know to even fear that...

        Marc

1) Sometimes telecommuting it isn't a choice

2) A remote office with a small number of employees pretty much falls into the same category as telecommuting from home. That's the situation I'm in.

      Marc

Or you could just use Ethernet with autoneg disabled. That is certainly possibly with optical Ethernet, and maybe even electrical at 100 Base-TX (not 1G or 10G though).

We never undock our Transformer that we've had since mid-summer - so we use it more like a netbook. But it really opens your eyes to how certain use cases are really improved used touch screen. Yes, you can get by with a mouse, but there are many things which are really much more efficient with touch. After extended use, my wife and I bought try to touch the screen on non-touch laptops - it is so much more natural than a mouse.

      Marc

Parent is exactly right - there is nothing fishy about law firms immediately putting out press releases about pending "investigations" when a public company gets an offer to be bought. Just go research any notable purchase over the past few years. It's really sad.

What are the chances that Boingo (and Heathrow, which surely gets revenue from Boingo) is not going to fight this, after spending the money they have adding wifi to London Heathrow? Anyone know the terms of their agreement (surely it isn't forever)?

Marc

There is no way to know without doing the FPGA design, at least at a high level. What you might make up for in one area, you might lose in another. The fact that the AMD's run at such a high clock rate with so many ALU's makes me doubt it would be worth it - but again, there is no way to know for sure without doing considerable work. Just going on number of ALU's (which is not really a proper way to compare, but is the only thing we for this discussion), only the latest HUGE and really expensive Virtex 7 parts have more DSP's.

      Marc

Ref:
http://www.xilinx.com/publications/prod_mktg/Virtex7-Product-Table.pdf vs.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU#Why_are_AMD_GPUs_faster_than_Nvidia_GPUs?

If you wish to just try it without seeing how they are integrating it into the OS, no. Duh

https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/thunderbird-stable

An effective Linux DVR is possible. I know it is not ideal, but you can use an HD-PVR in Linux to capture (in 1080i) the output of any device that provides component output. That's what many MythTV users do... rent the cable company box and just capture the output. Like I said, not ideal, but it is possible, and many are doing it.

Marc

Because management gets to decide what goes in the basement. Why would they waste a perfectly good view by giving it to the servers and routers?

      Marc