For what it's worth, AMD was, like any other technology company working on significant changes, under pressure to get a release out the door. Early releases are more technological previews than completed products. It takes several generations of incremental updates to get a new architecture to reach its performance potential, and when it comes to CPUs, relatively minor changes can have a significant impact on performance. Look at the difference with the original first generation bulldozer CPUs with piledriver, the first point upgrade.

To be fair, the first releases of the bulldozer microarchitecture were not impressive performance wise. That does not justify slamming the architecture entirely, it's immature technology that isn't there yet, but we are yet to see what it's capable of.

The whole point in standards is to provide compatibility between different implementations of that standard. If MS Word produces documents that qualify according to the OOXML specification, but rely on the deliberately vague parts referring to older document formats, any other implementation would not be able to process said document properly.

The mention of a wrench here is a perfect example of how to overlook favorable tendencies for left/right handedness. Yes, the tool itself can be used in either hand, but the direction in which nuts and screws are wound in typically favors right handed people. Similarly, scissors with no ergonomic shape to favor one hand over the other typically have the top blade on the right, which leaves the cut much easier to see if the scissors are held in the right hand.

I'm not intimately familiar with tools mankind has used throughout history, but I'd be cautious to make statements like "very few tools existed in historical times where handedness mattered at all".

As many readers have pointed out, the article is light on technical details. Based on the demonstration video on the article, it looks to me like they've come up with an algorithm to interlace models -- that is, to load and process 3D models in non-linear order. If that's the case, they could be producing simplified objects(with only enough polygons to render a pixel perfect image with a given resolution and viewing distance) from incredibly detailed models on the fly.

At 5:07 into the video is a demonstration of how games would typically show a simpler version of an object from far away and switch into a higher detailed version once the object comes closer. Their algorithm could be producing these dumbed down models on the fly, just not limited to two levels of detail but countless different variations.

The reason I called this interlacing is because it reminds me of how web sites with JPEG images would load over a slow dial-up modem back in the day. At first a blurry or pixelized version of the image was portrayed, and once the rest of the image was loaded (much later) the image had arrived at its full quality.

Clearly, Levis has never been to Spain.

With a year's experience working in a public hospital purchasing office I found (without searching) many critical security flaws in the processes. For example, the European Procurement Announcement agency regularly sends catalogs of EU-wide procurements in CD's that require Windows and autorun to function. The CD would start a web server off the disk and launch Internet Explorer to interface with the server. In other words, we regularly executed programs from CD's we got by mail in a very simple (and easy to replicate) packaging, on the same computers we use to make very expensive purchases (believe me, hospital equipment isn't cheap).

or 3) Their market share is sufficiently low to face antitrust investigations for monopolistic behavior.

Sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

Not if they have any sensible sampling frequency on the gas pedal. Under no circumstances should it be possible to go from 'idle' to 'flooring' without samples from the transition between the two extremes. It would be easy to recognize a faulty sensor when its input displays changes that are impossible to produce mechanically.

Paying a little extra for something more ecologically sustainable would hardly be qualified as "foolish". Most people could well afford it.

Just because the cases are not obvious doesn't mean there is no potential for exploit.

Keyboards get a lot of raw sensitive data: usernames and passwords, often even accompanied with the direct URLs where the credentials apply. Now, the keyboard obviously wouldn't be able to open a TCP/IP or UDP connection to upload the data, but it could sneak time-encoded hints about pre-recorded data into your typing. While you type, the keyboard firmware could impose miniature delays that would go unnoticed by the human eye, but would in turn influence the timing of packets sent by an SSH session. Such an attack wouldn't necessitate decrypting the SSH session and it would go completely unnoticed through all your Intrusion Detection Systems and firewalls. The practicality of such an attack can be questioned, but it demonstrates non-obvious applications.

The closest equivalent I can think of for a USB memory dongle would be firmware that could recognize, say, JPEG images in FAT file systems. Any information the firmware recognizes as interesting could be steganographically watermarked into your images by the time you pull them off the dongle. In such a case, any image you upload online that came from that dongle could contain sensitive information and you'd have no idea you uploaded it.

True, but the instruction set architecture doubles by size, resulting in larger binaries and more executable code to fetch from memory. As an example, the ARM instruction set is 32-bit by default, but ARM processors support a 16-bit Thumb mode. The programs typically execute slower in Thumb mode but often completion speed results in a net gain when the program is being loaded from slow flash/ROM. This is a typical set-up in many embedded systems.

He couldn't move to another license even if he wanted to. The contract works both ways: you are allowed to copy, modify and redistribute their project under the terms of the GPLv2, but any contributions sent to Linux must also adhere to the same terms. Thus, the contributions are GPLv2 and, without written consent from all contributors, changing the terms(license) is out of the question. He could, of course, change the license to the bits he wrote himself since he owns the copyright to them, but they only account for a small fraction of the whole kernel.

Actually, forcing everything down is not the most efficient way to save power - at least when it comes to CPU frequency governing. Dropping the speed does in indeed decrease power draw, but dropping the speed to 50% won't save 50% from the power draw, but it does double the calculation time and prevent the CPU from entering deep sleep states. It's often more power efficient to throttle up for the calculation, finish as fast as possible, and then enter sleep state.