all of them will only offer one because of the rampant stupidity of the Consumers to want smaller and lighter.

Sadly most laptop consumers are weak waifs that can barely carry 3 pounds. Those of us that do real work on laptops want a 21 pound 21" laptop with at least 10 USB ports 2 serial and frigging lasers.

Exactly. I generally don't look at the polls until I'm bored and there's nothing interesting on the front page, then go and read the comments it's collected. Sometimes I'll see an interesting poll, comment early, and then go back a week or so later once it has a few hundred comments. This is a stupid idea.

That said, the front page also has a 'Video Bytes' line half way down full of crap, so I guess someone is really keen on killing the site. Thank $DEITY for Soylent News...

You are 100% correct. Although I went a step further. Relatives I have moved away from Linux to Chromebooks and ChomeBoxes. That way I have ZERO maintenance for the devices. I dont even have to do any updates at all. It's wonderful and my family members are all so happy they dont have to do any stupid windows tricks.

Nokia has also been in the market of selling the infrastructure for mobile networks for a long time. And, unlike the handsets, this is a very profitable place to be. Both Nokia and Ericsson saw the commoditisation of the handset market and Nokia in particular watched their margins evaporate and decided it was time to get out. But because they're now no longer in the public eye, they're perceived as losing. Now their customers are people who make money from the products that they sell, so are willing to pay a reasonable premium because a few minutes of downtime costs far more.

Of course, when Apple decides to concentrate on the high-margin part of a business, no one claims that they're dying, because they concentrate on a consumer-visible part of the market.

And for some reason, they don't like to tell you the salary up front. I made it a practice to refuse to follow up if I don't know the potential salary. I made the policy after wasting my time in interviews only to discover the companies were run by tight-wads who were offering far below the industry standard (which explained why they were hiring).

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.