Otherwise, why would IBM be willing to unleash the Nazgul on the Hercules Emualtor?

Here is a rundown of the mainframe legal landscape.

x86 is the fox in the mainframe henhouse, just like it is with RISC. Just today we hear that Windows is the #1 server OS.

Aren't you glad that you aren't trying to sell a MIPS server right now?

See the source.

Today one of the most significant features of the ARM family is its low power consumption. But that hadn't been an initial goal, according to Furber. “We designed the ARM for an Acorn desktop product, where power isn't of primary importance. But it had to be cheap. Cheap meant it had to go in a plastic package, plastic packages have a fairly high thermal resistance, so we had to bring it in under 1W.”

The power test tools they were using were unreliable and approximate, but good enough to ensure this rule of thumb power requirement. When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time.

Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.

As Wilson tells it: “The development board [we] plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."

The 22nm technology is very good, and Intel can use it to "bless" specific ARM market segments and thereby control them.

Intel could feasibly make the fastest and most power-efficient ARM processors with a 22nm foundry, and could craft customer contracts in such a way as to prevent those CPUs from entering devices that compete with the x86 products.

If and when Intel develops an architecture that is competitive to ARM, it would then have established supply relationships into the targeted market segments.

And from an engineering standpoint, ARM could use extra wasted die space on x86 wafers.

Furthermore, in the Android world, who particularly cares about the cpu? Seen any "ARM Inside" logos lately? Intel felt the opposite side of this when they lost xbox to power.

I can't argue with Intel's success, but they make a lot of decisions that don't make financial sense to me.

I should RTFA, but let's just consider a few things...

The nerves that convey the 5 senses to the human brain don't appear to run at very high data rates - the challenge is correct interfacing and data encoding. Granted, we don't appear to have made much progress, but I would guess that within 10 years there will be a variety of solutions to this problem. I can see a redesign of Toxoplasma Gondii, for instance.

Once the 5 senses can be disconnected from the body at will, nutrition can be delivered without any concern for aesthetics. When this happens, we can abandon the "boutique" industries of grain-intensive livestock production, in the same way that we abandoned land-line phones. The actual perceived experience of nourishment will likely have improved aesthetics by the delivery of digital data, while the excesses and inefficiencies of the farming industry will be reduced, then removed.

At this point, we will all most likey have a giant Apple logo stamped on our foreheads. Isn't it wonderful having something pleasant to anticipate?

As Ray Kurzweil has pointed out, if Moore's law holds for another 30 years, a machine intelligence a billion times more powerful than all of humanity can emerge. Ambitious projects to emulate more and more complex biological intelligence in silicon are well underway.

What would such a thing need us for?

What is even more disturbing is that the exponential trend identified by Moore can be found in completely unrelated economic figures, energy use figures, patent volume figures, and many more.

Humans seem destined to ride an exponential wave, and not to notice until it's too late.

And all the while, the Fermi paradox waits before us like a dark chasm.

SPICE was originally written in Fortran, if I remember correctly. In '94, I ran across a public tarfile with the Fortran source, and tweaked "f2c" output which I was able to compile on HP-UX PA-RISC. I also wrote an X-Windows frontend with Motif. It could pipe the "dot-matrix" output into the xmgr graphics package. I think that I still have the source code somewhere. Mail me if you want it. http://rhadmin.org/

...and Itanium is the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

I'm not sure what sort of Faustian Bargain HP made with Intel over Itanium, but it certainly had nothing to do with quality products or customer service.

Anyone sane bolted for Linux long ago.

IBM destroyed the mainframe clone market. While I don't know much about it, Amdahl and others had machines compatible with the 360 architecture that would run IBM's operating systems. IBM has been successful in even keeping the free Hercules emulator from legally running their OS.

Larry Ellison has never destroyed a major competetor - Sybase and Informix still stand.

Ellison also did not build Union Carbide, Dow Chemical, or Monsanto. Ellison can sleep at night, deservedly so.

Rather than FTP, use rsync. Protect the data with PAR2. I use a Calvary SATA cradle with RAID 1 (mirroring) between two identical drives. I bought the USB model for $40; it's fast enough to burn a DVD at full speed.