Yep Learn to say NO.

All companies are out to screw you. So you are a fool. A complete fool, if you give the company any loyalty.

Do not be afraid or feel bad to jump ship to another company that is offering something better. Also don't ever be afraid to ask for more money, because I guarantee you are underpaid.

There's some overlap. Altera FPGAs have lots of fixed-function blocks on them, ranging from simple block RAMs to fast floating point units. There's a good chance that Intel could reuse some of their existing designs (which, after all, are already optimised for their manufacturing process) from things like AVX units and caches on x86 chips. A lot of the FPGAs also include things like PCIe, USB, Ethernet and so on controllers. Again, Intel makes these in their chipset division and, again, they're optimised for Intel's process so being able to stick them on FPGAs instead of the Altera ones would make sense.

The main reason that you're probably right is that Intel is generally pretty bad at getting their own internal divisions to play nicely together, let alone ones that are used to being in a completely separate company.

Biggest problem THERE would be that they'd have to open up the X86 kimono a bit more than they'd really want to do that with NIOS.  I won't be surprised in one way (your meaning of the situation) if they do it and surprised all the same- because they're giving stuff out that can be more readily reverse engineered through the tools, etc. that people would get as a result of that decision.

Not a conflict of interest.  Just that a competitor just bought your supplier.  Big difference.  It's a problem that you need to find a new supplier.  The drawbacks with FPGAs is that there's nothing other than your sole supplier is just that.  You can't readily or easily swap out the FPGAs like you can SoC's in the ARM or MIPS space- or like RAM or eMMC's.  There's a bit of "standard" and "open" involved with things there.  I consider it necessary evil to be using them because they're not as open or "standardized" as the other stuff- but the moment someone wises up, even though it'll be a race to the bottom like the other plays, they will be the "king" there.

You might want to look at the papers from MS Research on their use of FPGAs in their data centres.

My guess would be coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures. Altera FPGAs aren't just FPGAs, they also have a load of fixed-function blocks. The kinds of signal processing that the other poster talks about work because there are various floating point blocks on the FPGA and so you're using the programmable part to connect a sequence of these operations together without any instruction fetch/decode or register renaming overhead (you'd be surprised how much of the die area of a modern CPU is register renaming and how little is ALUs).

FPGAs are great for prototyping (we've built an experimental CPU as a softcore that runs on an Altera FPGA at 100MHz), but there are a lot of applications that could be made faster by being able to wire a set of SSE / AVX execution units together into a fixed chain and just fire data at them.

They're big and slow compared to an ASIC, yes.  But the thing is, they're not big and slow overall- they're reconfigurable and you can dynamically change the logic (Witness Altera's OpenCL offering on the higher-end stuff they offer...  You don't offer that unless you're competitive with GPUs...) on the fly.  They have a place and it's not always custom logic.  It's adaptable custom logic- which ASICs **CANT** do.  CPUs are slow and plodding in many of the tasks you're talking about in that space- and GPUs are cumbersome and painful to use compared to them for that use.

That minimum wage guy is one of the major costs for a taxi company. The IRS rates miles driven in a car at a little under 60/mile, which should cover maintenance, depreciation, insurance and fuel. A taxi that only had these costs could be quite profitable at 70/mile. In New York, taxis cost $2/mile, which isn't that far off other places in the USA. The minimum wage guy needs to be paid even when the taxi is waiting for the next fare. With an automated car, you'd just leave them scattered around the city powered down and turn on the closest one when you got a new job.

Glad to see DICE holding strong on their scumware downloaders.

I see your education on macs and OSX is so horribly outdated that your comment is essentially useless. Many do worry about it this is why several virus scanner companies are making products for OSX. Hell you can even get a free Avast for OSX. They would not even bothered if people were not asking for it.

"Just this space where you can hide and survive an OS wipe and reinstall." IF the user only put the unit to sleep and then woke it. Simply turning off the unit for a short time before OS wipe and reinstall defeats this potential hole.

I am betting that Windows, BSD, and Linux have a similar vulnerability lurking.

Guess who?

And the endorsements keep coming in...

A Kickstarter-like model would work. Release a single for free, designate an amount that you think the full album is worth. If enough people are willing to pay, then you release the album for free. For the second album, hopefully enough people have copied the first that you don't need to do much to encourage them to pay for the second. As an added bonus, you can reduce your up-front costs by only renting the studio time to record the first track and only record the rest once people have paid for it.

Recording a song (at least, a song that people want to buy) requires talent, creativity, and often expensive instruments and studio time. Copying a song once it's recorded is basically free. Any business model that relies on doing the difficult thing for free and then trying to persuade people to pay for you to do the easy thing is doomed to failure. Imagine if Ford had noticed that people wanted coloured cars and decided to give away unpainted cars and charge for painting them, then bribed politicians to pass laws so that only Ford was allowed to paint cars Ford sold and driving an unpainted car on the road was illegal. It wouldn't take people long to realise that this was a stupid business model and that you could get rid of the laws and charge for the cars, but in the case of copyright people are still trying very hard to make the 'free car, expensive and exclusive paint' model work with different variations.

It's an ABI mismatch, and the summary is nonsense, saying almost the exact opposite of TFA (which I actually read, because the summary is obvious nonsense). The issue is that the Windows ABI defines long double as being a 64-bit floating point value (which is fine, because the only requirement for long double is that it have no less precision than double. If you're using it and expecting some guaranteed precision for vaguely portable code then you're an idiot). For some reason, MinGW (which aims to be ABI-compatible with MS, at least for C libraries) uses 80-bit x87 values for long double, so you get truncation. I forget the exact calling conventions for Windows i386, but I believe that in some cases this will be silently hidden, as the value will be passed in x87 register and so be transparently extended to 80 bits in the caller and truncated in the callee anyway. It's only if it's passed on the stack (or indirectly via a pointer) that it's a problem.

It's not obvious which definition of long double is better. On modern x86, you'll use SSE for 32- and 64-bit values, and may lose precision moving between x87 and SSE registers. You also get worse IEEE compliance out of the x87 unit, which may matter more than the extra 16 bits of precision. 80-bit floats are not available on any platform other than x86 (128-bit is more common, though PowerPC has its own special non-IEEE version of these and on some other platforms they're entirely done in software), so they're a bad choice if you want portable code that generates the same output on different platforms.