Note that the US is not directly involved in any of the major patent holdings. IBM is not really a US company anymore. They are "international". To a great extent they are getting out of the US. A few year ago they stopped listing their employment by country, because they wanted to hide what they were doing. So if there is ever a situation where US interests collide with IBM economic interests then the US will get the short end of the stick.

This is what happens when you let everything get privatized, including basic research. You end up with no stake in the future.

As someone with 45+ years of software experience I can personally verify that software development has not improved significantly over the last 25 years or so. The two most important changes are that there is much less assembly programming (outside of imbedded systems) and each hardware vendor does not have their own completely incompatible operating system. Most of the rest of the "improvements" are pretty much moot beyond that.

OOP has never lived up to it's hype. No matter how "object oriented" a system is, it is still just as likely to be late and/or broken as in pre-OOP days. Development, maintenance and modification is not automatically better with OOP.

The lessons of good language design might as well not exist. PHP is a cesspool of bad design and implementation. JavaScript, even though it has some nice features (closures) has an obscure object model that is difficult to understand and is a wreck just waiting to happen. (Any body can overwrite the basic implementation of built in functions. Really? ObjectHasOwnProperty. Really?) C++ finally got a reasonable memory management model after C++03 with RAII/smart pointers. What did that take, 30+ years? Python and Lua are reasonably good, but they seem to be niche players. Java isn't a programming language, it is a self contained universe. Like a black hole, once you go in you never come out. And even if it's OK now, the fact that Oracle in in charge means that it is like Middle Earth if Sauron won. (Yes. Ellison is that bad.)

I can't be certain, but I strongly believe that one of the reason for the lack of progress is that there are not a lot of old programmers still in the profession. Unlike other engineering fields, say civil engineering, chemical engineering, etc careers tend to be short. There are not enough people around to say "we tried a version of that 15 year ago, and it had these pitfalls." The result is that the same mistakes keep getting made over and over again. This fits in with the observation that as a profession we have not improved much on estimating project requirements and being on time and on budget.

That's one of the reasons I hate the term "Software Engineering". We are not real engineers because we can't deliver on time with predictable results and a predefined cost. It's not that this happens all the time in other engineering areas, it's just that it rarely happens with software.

You want contempt for the constitution? Where were you when Cheney said he was not a part of the executive, legislative or judicial branch of government, so none of the rules apply? (Sound of crickets.....)

I'm pissed off a Holder as well, but obvious right wingers start calling him the most corrupt, all I smell is the stench of ripe hypocrisy. STFU until you are willing to call out someone on your side of the political fence.

The current Haswell generation, and some of the previous generations have something called WiDi. It's for wireless HD where some of the WiFI processing is done in the CPU.

Haswell CPUs also have multiple autonomous CPUs (besides the built in graphics) that can run even when the chip is nominally powered down. These controllers have no published specs. The architecture is unknown, the software is unknown.

In the post-Snowden era it is also known the the NSA has a way to get data off systems that are separated by an air gap from the outside environment.

Now if you were one of the major powers in the world would you want to have a supercomputer, or any computer in a sensitive installation, saying "Intel Inside"?

It's not just about nuclear simulation or CFD weapon design codes. It's about oil/gas exploration, wartime logistics, economics, drug design, and climate forecasts (even if the Republicans don't believe in climate change, the Russians and Chinese are not that stupid).

So building your own CPU on fabs where you have physical control is a matter of national security. It would be unsurprising if certain government programs in the US only used Intel chips made in the US. If it was my responsibility that's what I would do.

The Burroughs part is a tagged memory architecture. There is no assembler, a variant of ALGOL is the system programming language. It's a hardware stack machine. Each memory word has tag bits that identify what kind of information is stored. Memory addressing is through segments, which do hardware bounds checking. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems for details.

The hardware and software were designed concurrently. This means that the system is very efficient and not very prone to software errors. Because of the hardware addressing mechanisms and the memory protection bits, this machine was immune to many of the security issues that plague modern CPU architectures. It is near to impossible to break security, because it is enforced by a combination of hardware and software. No current x86/Power/Sparc/??? will ever be as secure as this kind of machine. (The Mill CPU has some of the same characteristics, but lacks tagged memory bits in main memory.)

As a field, computing took a wrong turn when it went after MIPS as a measure of "goodness". Using hardware resources to enforce secure computing address the fundamental problem of writing reliable software. It protects against coding errors and against malicious attacks. Now that hardware is cheap, the additional cost of tag bits in memory or address range checking could be easily supported.

But we're stuck with fast insecure architectures and there seems to be no turning back. It wouldn't be surprising that current systems are in fact less efficient when you take into account the cost of trying to make insecure hardware secure along with the costs associated with software failures and stolen data, corrupted data bases, down time, debugging, etc. (By the way, Burroughs systems had great up times, which was also true of Symbolics Lisp systems, which also had memory tag bits and was programmed from the bottom up in a high level language.)

You're absolutely right. You should immediately stop whatever you are doing and develop that exact camera at a significantly lower price point then anything else out there using your vast knowledge of electronics and photography.

Or you could stop being an arm chair quarterback and STFU. Have you ever done anything vaguely like this? Have you ever done anything on your own initiative at all? Somehow I doubt it. You post here so you can pretend to be knowledgeable by denigrating people who are actually doing something.

Why don't you get your cheap shot ego fix somewhere else? You are the sludge that makes Slashdot a bore to read. Go away and leave us alone. We don't like you and we don't need you. Go away. Now.

As opposed to the tiny cute nuclear plants that you can get in all sorts of different colors and patterns.

You are now in a condition where you fall into one of two exclusive categories

1. You also make this complaint during the Bush administration. His use of executive power completely shredded the constitution. Just look at what Bush did with signing statements. And then there is the time that Chaney said the he was his own branch of government. Not in the executive, legislative or judicial. Did you make any comment about breaking the constitution at that time?

2. You are a de facto KKK member who hates the President because of the color of his skin

These are mutually exclusive choices. Somehow I can guess which one is more likely. So does it get stuffy on your nights out with the hood?

(By the way, I am extremely unhappy with Obama's action on constitutional rights. I was unhappy with Bush as well. As far as I can tell it's a race to the bottom, with Bush somewhat ahead. Obama might still come out ahead, he still has a couple of years to go.)

Stockman is one of the stranger Tea Party candidates who recently was elected to the House.

He walked out of the State of the Union Address saying "I could not bear to watch as he continued to cross the clearly-defined boundaries of the Constitutional separation of powers". Really adult.

He's running for Senate in Texas against Senator Corwyn, the Senate Minority Whip, and he just dropped off the map. He missed 17 House votes in a row. It also seems that even though he is a official candidate, he is doing zero campaigning. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-senate-candidate-steve-stockman-goes-awol/

He has also been cited by the Office of Congressional Ethics (I know, I laughed too). He accepted campaign contributions from his own staff members, which is a big no no. He is also accused of using his full time House staff members to work on his Congressional campaign. They all pull this trick, but there is a legal way and a stupid way to do this. He chose stupid. http://oce.house.gov/2014/06/june-11-2014---oce-referral-regarding-rep-steve-stockman.html

So it's not surprising that he would be the one to further complicate the snake pit of uncontrolled domestic surveillance by injecting it into a congressional investigation. Considering his quote about Obama breaking the constitution, his appeal to use unconstitutionally collected data to get at the IRS is mind boggling. His brain is clearly an irony free zone.

Dell is a reseller. They do not invest in any of the fundamental technologies like CPUs or Operating Systems. They have no design expertise in virtual machines like the JVM. They don't do chip design or fab. They have never been in any of these businesses.

HP has a long history of OS and CPU design, including their own computers with a proprietary architecture. Not all of their designs were successful, since they were co-designers of the Itanium with Intel. So HP has the exactly opposite corporate background the Dell.

Why would anyone pay attention to what a Dell talking head has to say?

Given the genius level of legal reasoning in Peoria, I wonder if the defense will try and contact the judge by email and tell them that the city should be protected from financial liability because of taxes.

Since the cable scum have monopolies in their service areas, and they are clearly interstate businesses, there should be some other entity at the Federal level that can address this issue. I'm guess the FTC, but it not them, there should be someone else.

Oops, I forgot that we don't have any actual capitalism in the USA any more, because the regulators are all controlled by industry groups. Forget it. Your cable/phone/ISP bill is going to continue to go up far faster then inflation, and your service will suck even more. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Nothing to see here, move along. No capitalism, no competition, no democracy.

Snowden said he sent emails to the appropriate internal authorities before he went rogue, and the NSA said they couldn't find them. Everyone in the political establishment believed the NSA version. Now the IRS says that they can't find emails because of a technical problem, and no one believes them.

The NSA are professional liars. They've been caught lying about a huge number of things: spying on friendly foreign leaders, mass phone surveillance on everyone in the USA, modifying routers before they are shipped overseas, etc.

Double standard much? Who is more likely to be lying: the NSA or the IRS? Everyone in Washington are going after the IRS. Committees are meeting, IRA officials are testifying under oath, criminal investigations have been started. Higher ups at the IRA are going to be forced out, and there will be criminal charges. The same thing is also going to occur with the Veteran's Administration scandal.

Meanwhile over at the NSA, the sound of crickets. They claim that their own secret investigations have found they did everything right. Somehow this seems good enough. No one has been called to task. Even the people responsible for letting Snowden get access to all that information seem to be off the hook.

As bad as the IRS and VA situations are, they pale in comparison to the NSA situation and yet nothing has happened as a result. It's business as usual. The NSA is completely unaccountable to anybody for anything, and when they do screw up nothing happens to any insiders. This is guaranteed to result in a culture of incompetence. We are in big trouble.

I agree 100%. How can there be global warming when the world flat, not spherical?