If it's in the CPU I bought, how should it never have had that feature that's clearly in the CPU I bought?

This is the CPU equivalent of those car makers wanting a subscription to enable the heated seats. Maybe AMD will enable it for $5 a month or something.

It's basically buying a car and having heated seats installed even if you didn't pay for them. They did it because it simplifies production. If you choose to enable it yourself, it's unsupported - so if you activate the heated seats yourself that sets your car on fire, they may not warrant the vehicle against the damage and insurance might deny coverage. And yes, usually the heated seats are just left unconnected, so people have hooked their own power connections and switches to manually turn them on and off.

Likewise, producing a a die is very expensive - it's like $100K per mask, and you need 20-30 masks per chip (so about $2-3M to produce a mask set which needs ot be done before you can make one chip). Those chips are then fused so they can be customized per requirements. So one die design can fulfill several lines of processors from low to mid to high end chips and create product differentiation.

Of course, the documentation also will usually not describe features you're not supposed to have,usually those registers are marked as "must be set to zero" and configuration registers are not documented. It's why you often find missing registers in register listings.

Enterprising people who have access often can discover hidden functionality if they try misconfiguring the register and seeing what happens. But such things are unofficial.

Of course, it's entirely possible that because to fix some bugs, they may need to disconnect some blocks so they could re-use the transistors - because often you can get away with just re-wiring the transistors rather than having to remake the entire mask set. It's what makes the difference between say, B1 to B2 steppings from B5 to C0 steppings - the B1 to B2 usually just means a metal layer rework so it's much cheaper as you only need to redo a subset of masks. When they go from B5 to C0, it usually indicates that a whole new mask set was created.

But it could easily mean that they fused out the MEU so you couldn't unofficially enable it, or maybe they borrowed the transistors to fix some other flaw.

Well, school has been sucking the life out of reading for over a century nowadays. It's always been a problem - honestly I love reading and read a ton of stuff. But I also remember reading being a chore in school because the stuff you're forced to read generally isn't very interesting.

My school didn't force me to read 1984. So one day out of boredom I read it because it was referenced in a lot of places, and I found it a very interesting read. Maybe not if I was forced to read it, long before anyone really pointed out why I should be reading it.

Maybe school should start emphasizing why the reading materials chosen are actually relevant instead of just going through Jane Eyre and analyzing all the subplots.

Of course, this is in early elementary school though. By college you already should have a basic amount of reading level because you gotta read your textbooks. But also by then most reading I woiuld do would be recreational, and some from genres I really dislike in my days growing up like history. But give me a book on the history of computing? Yes please!

School does a bad job at encouraging students to read in the early years. But by college one should already be able to be literate. Then again, with your phone pinging every 5 seconds, chances are the real reason is shortened attention spans - you can't sit down and read a page without your mind wandering or waiting for that ping.

I remember back in 1997 seeing countless job postings that needed 20+ years of Cisco experience, and have seen the same sort of insanity repeated with every new tech fad that comes along. Why would the biggest tech fad of all be any different?

At least though Cisco was around since 1984 so you could get the better part of 20 years of Cisco experience.

The worst was 1996 or so and needing 5+ years of Java. Which has only come out the year before.

I always wonder though what recruiters and HR folks think when all their applicants all seem to fall well short of their requirements/

That said, what Trump did was crazy, and Iran might be more likely to get a nuclear weapon now than they were a year ago. If you want something done right, don't trust Trump to do it because he's like an MBA: his primary skill is knowing how to take power.

That happened during Trump 1.0 when he ripped up the agreement Obama negotiated with Iran. Something that took the better part of a decade to accomplish - 5 years of informal back and forth negotiations followed by an intense 18 month diplomatic formal negotiation.

And by the end of it, Iran had nuclear inspectors crawling everywhere, including ones from Israel per the agreement. That was the status until Trump ripped up the agreement, and Iran kicked everyone out as retaliation.

The best I got from this is "status quo" - the US side saying that. Iran's side just added reparations. In other words, nothing happened other than hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, lives wasted, and we're back to where things were on Feb 27.

Except now Iran knows it has a powerful economic weapon it can wield effectively.

And prices will not drop - everyone's been using up the strategic reserve to make up for the loss of transport. Those reserves need to be replenished, which is why gas prices will remain elevated.

At best, because the strategic reserves were likely reaching levels never seen since they were established in the 80s, is likely why the US had to agree to basically a nothing plan - because in a month or two, gas prices will shoot up again and it'll be like the 70s.

Add to that "The US doesn't need anything Canada has". Well, if you kill off importing oil from Canada, that trade deficit turns into a surplus with Canada. Oil imports are the only reason there is a trade deficit.

Not only do we have the concept of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement; the current level of disagreement between the agreeing parties suggests that we actually have at least three distinct concepts of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement! Where a lesser leader might myopically interpret having a single agreed-upon set of terms as essential to a treaty; Great Leader understands that American Greatness requires more.

Funny how we worry about tiny errors in sqrt on a computer and yet we rave about hallucinating AI. I think fundamentally the problem with AI is that the common non-techie is believing the answer from AI like they do from a sqrt. I still recall I think it was Intel that had the major flub in some IEEE math result that many wanted to have Intel do a complete recall. I can't remember the details it has been so long and I didn't own the product so it did not affect me. If it was an AI error, no one would even notice it was such a tiny error like microsoft's calculator.

Because people do expect their calculators to give exact results. And small errors in calculations bring questions.

AI hallucinations are giving people huge problems - you see it in forums where people ask for help, show the AI guidance they used and then everyone is pointing out the AI slop they followed was incorrect. But then the poster gets indignant and refuses to take on any suggestions to fix their problems because they believe AI is better than humans.

As for the Intel bug, it's because early Pentium 60 and 66MHz chips had an error in the FDIV instruction that would give an incorrect result. Intel tried to play it down as an error so minor no one would encounter it, but that just made people angrier. Because it's not that no one would encounter it, but that if one did, they wouldn't know and might be relying on it. That and the fact that the Pentium was an expensive chip, so people spending several hundred dollars on a CPU would want one that was correct.

The error was in the division tables that are on-chip. Like many floating point operations, the instruction relies on internal tables to speed up calculations. The problem was the code to generate the tables was faulty and produced a zero instead of a value. That faulty table was burned into the table ROM of the chip and produced the erroneous values. CPUs with a correct table didn't have an issue. (I believe the table was a log table as it's easiest way to speed up a division by turning it into a subtraction).

Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I fixed that for you. Can't wait for the mental gymnastics fiat supporters have to go through to explain how inflation is good for the economy

The economy relies on money circulating around. You need to spend money on stuff which will keep the economic engine going because that money then gets spent on other things and so on.

Now, there are actually 4 events - deflation, zero growth, inflation, and hyper inflaction. All except inflation are bad. Deflation is bad because it encourages savings - why buy a loaf of bread today when tomorrow it's cheaper? Sure you need to eat, but maybe you need to eat a little less so we can stretch what we have a little longer so we can avoid buying what we need the longest.

Zero growth is similar - though at least it means you eat as necessary since it's not going up or down. But there's no incentive to do anything.

Hyperinflation, or really, inflation beyond mild inflation is bad - and that's generally considered more than 2%. Prices are going up so fast that wages can't keep up and you really need to buy now which contributes to more inflation.

Mild inflation is where you generally want to be - usually between half to 2% at most. Here your savings will devalue over time, but not so fast you need to spend it all immediately with none for the future, but also means you want to generate value added products from the economy - gathering raw materials, refining it, processing it, producing products, etc. Each economic step adds value and the economy grows.

Bitcoin's fault is it's deflationary. Spending it is stupid - it's why BTC commerce is a fringe activity. No one's using bitcoin for everyday transactions because it costs more and it's stupid. You're better off collecting bitcoin because it's a fixed quantity and once you run out, that's it. That's why the big whales in BTC aren't doing anything - lots of coins are stored up in cold wallets. Winklevoss twins reportedly own over 20% of available coins. Of course, they have enough assets elsewhere that they're not using BTC at all for day to day living.

The real scam to Bitcoin is simple - it's trivial to start another coin. It's why any exchange has hundreds to thousands of coins they support. You know the big ones, but the rest are all small bit players. You also know Trump coin is in there.

Meanwhile, starting your own fiat currency is a lot harder. It does happen now and again, but very few actually last, almost none span beyond a local town and get very little coverage. But there is the odd alternative currency that does - any Canadian knows about Canadian Tire Money, which in the early days were paper reward coupons but before they stopped issuing physical notes started having real money-like protections because many people began accepting them informally.

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

What is practically useless are all the airplanes in the air at any one time, most of which burn more fuel in one flight than it takes to heat a 200 homes for an entire winter. We need electric aircraft - badly.

But electric aircraft are impractical from many aspects. You see, unlike a car whose engine is basically idling most of the time an aircraft engine is working hard. A car engine may generate 200+hp on 1.5L displacement, but an aircraft engine can get 160hp... from 5L. But the aircraft engine will be developing 80-100hp just flying through the air, while the car engine is likely only doing 10hp to maintain speed on the highway.

Car engines have been repurposed - but are severely de-rated.

The end result is the car engine spends a lot of time doing nothing and running inefficiently, which leaves open possibilities like hybrid drivetrains where you can run the engine more efficiently and use the excess to charge a battery for later use.

Hybrid engines have been tried for airplanes, and they aren't very successful because there aren't many opportunities to generate electricity.

Electric aircraft are a reality for short (20 min) flights or training, but it's not likely to be beyond it.

What part of people don't give a shit as long as their water and power are not affected is unclear to you? That's it. Data centers in small towns will always affect the local infrastructure. In decades past, datacenters had to build all the infrastructure they needed. And the locals didn't give a shit as long as they did that. What is happening now is the rush to build new datacenters wants to skip over the infrastructure problems.

Until recently, datacenters were located near urban areas - the power, water and more importantly, data connectivity required it.

The ONLY reason they're going after small towns is cheap land. But small towns rarely have big city infrastructure - the power and water are sized for the expected growth - a data center can easily consume double or more than what the town does and overwhelm the local utilities. And other times, it's simply beyond what the resources have available - aquifers only replenish so fast.

And in other places, it's water rights being bought up for data centers - but it also means excess use costs a lot more.

My response was specifically to the original poster who, for some reason, was taking a "we are losing the class wars; breed faster!" position rather than the "if you are already losing the class war why would you even think about putting in that much effort and cost so your children can deal with a bad or worse outcome?" position.

It would honestly not surprise me if that is a nontrivial contributing factor: If you aren't emotionally invested in children as an end in themselves the wage and cost of living numbers have done very little to encourage you to see them as affordable since roughly the late 70s(with a combination of substantial stagnation for anyone who is primarily wages rather than capital gains; and such good news as there is mostly confined to people who complete at least undergraduate education and remain in a career track full time) and people who are emotionally invested in children are often willing to go to considerable lengths to try to improve their children's outcomes; but are presumably discouraged by the prospect that they will most likely be downwardly mobile instead.

It's not a surprise that people who want labor, cannon fodder, or taxpayers to be abundant for them are fretting about it; but it's hard to see why most of us should care. Why do things that are good for society when society is pretty overtly disinterested in being good for you? You may be able to squeeze the current labor market a bit; because people who already exist tend to take the "or starve" possibility pretty seriously when deciding what they will put up with; but if you offer nothing but the demand for a toiling underclass to encourage people to have children that's not terribly compelling, either for those who aren't interested in sacrificing for children and see hitting education and career hard as increasingly existential or for people who would sacrifice a lot to better things for their children but are more or less accurate in seeing it as highly unlikely that they will be able to.

I'm rather doubtful of the plan's viability; but if they are willing to justify the company name by chaining Bezos to a rock so a bird can eat his liver repeatedly I could be persuaded.

I'm not sure what confuses you here: everybody has an EoL, age related if nothing else, and they don't live on either through their class or their descendants. What do you gain by throwing more poor bastards into a sucker's game when you could just not?

Yeah, it's ultimately a matter of taste and what becomes economically and strategically feasible; but I figured that there is at least a conceptual distinction between weapons that are better at being obedient(basically any attempt at stable aerodynamics on the low end up to electromechanical gyroscopic stuff, to TERCOM and GNSS guidance; but you specify where you want it to go and the guidance system attempts to minimize or counteract outside influences), weapons that can independently follow a very specific instruction(at least the simpler acoustic and IR seekers where you need to point them toward a particular loud/bright object but they can compensate for it moving, to a degree); and finally the ones that can take fairly generalized instructions of the "anything that looks like a target in this area" flavor; which seemed like the best candidates for 'autonomous'.