3 years ago, my department went with Acer V5-571P laptops. Every single one has been broken and destroyed from casual use. We've found serious manufacturing defects and other flaws, and Acer is not interested in fixing it.
5 years ago, however, we had a small batch of Lenovo E430 devices. These devices are in much better shape than the devices two years younger than them.
We have a few other groups of 'incremental updates' that have the exact same results. Lenovo devices hold up much better.
Say what you will about Lenovo's shady practices, but their computers are built like tanks.
I'm upset about these revelations, and I'm not sure my next laptop would be a ThinkPad.
However, I'm still happy with ThinkPad hardware and I'll still consider them when I need a new laptop. They're the only vendor including a three-button trackpoint, which I enjoy using over a touchpad. They have a nice no-nonsense aesthetic. While the build quality has suffered over the years, they're still sturdy and reliable, more so than most competitors.
I'm also pretty sure they're not the only ones doing this kind of bullshit. They're just doing a poor enough job to get caught in the act.
Aboriginal people wouldn't be in Australia at all if it weren't for sea level lowering, so you could say it's actually more dramatic than flooding.
"There is considerable discussion among archeologists as to the route taken by the first migrants to Australia, widely taken to be ancestors of the modern Aborigines. Migration took place during the closing stages of the Pleistocene, when sea levels were much lower than they are today."[1]
"It is generally believed that Aboriginal people are the descendants of a single migration into the continent, a people that split from the first modern human populations to leave Africa 64,000 to 75,000 years ago, although a minority propose that there were three waves of migration, most likely island hopping by boat during periods of low sea levels"[2]
Since we are land animals, a lowering of the sea would provide more grounds to be covered by humans; more space means less interaction and less conflict.
Maybe the sense of wonderment in finding new grounds is not enough to be folk-told throughout generations. As in the news, we tend to stick to the bad news rather than the good ones.
They starve even before their military service- The only reason this comes up for the military is because soldiers from both sides appear near each other on the borders, making the height comparison easy.
south korea specifically picks only tall soldiers to stand guard at the border. They do it on purpose to intimidate the north koreans. It is consider special duty in south korean army and you must be hand picked. The US does this shit too, to be a flag bearer or part of official honor guard you must be over 6 feet tall
Starvation alongside a severe lack of essential nutrients. So even if they get enough calories in their daily intake its likely their highly restricted choices make it near impossible to obtain the right nutrients
If somebody put something online fifteen years ago, they might not care about it anymore, but I might. With the current web, I can mirror that content by downloading it and putting it on a new server. With this system, that process would be part of the basic workings of the system.
With bittorrent you could make a call in a public forum for more seeds for a file. And if people have a copy of that particular content they can reseed.
I wonder if this would also be possible in this case?
For example, my small server might serve 200 sites but I'll backup around 500 or so older ones somewhere else.
Digital electronics means thinking of a transistor as a switch. It's got three terminals, if there's a positive voltage on the control terminal then the other two are connected and power can flow through it. That's basically it.
If you connect billions of switches in the right pattern you get a computer. Billions of little switches clicking on and off, no more, no less. No pixies or magic dust involved.
> R3000 sold extremely well (over 1 million units were produced).
Although I know it's not directly comparable, I was at an ST event recently, and the representative said they were making one million STM32 ARM microcontrollers per day.
I know, we've shipped about 800 million MIPS CPUs in the last year alone.
But for that time in history, a million processors was a big milestone. You also have to remember that in 1988 MIPS was a three-year old company battling established vendors.
Both MIPS and ARM sell CPU IP therefore I'm sure anyone here can dig up several examples of patent infringements that ended up in court.
I think what sets us apart from the competition is the fact that a MIPS CPU is now completely open and free for university use, including production-quality Verilog code and tools from Xilinx.
It takes quite some big brass b^H^H^H^H^H^H^H PR skills to downplay Lexra disaster that (together with market crash and other events around year 2000) costed MIPS itself quite dearly in both money directly and more importantly in market position. Need I remind you that was right around the time of ARM's spectacular rise: Quite literally MIPS Technologies being too busy with this litigation is the only good explanation why it was blind to the real threat: ARM7TDMI taking embedded/telecom market by storm. Only burgeoning xDSL market (and good availability of established binary-only MIPS codebase for it) that saved MIPS in early 2000s.
Not to mention quite egregious fact-twisting I see in your reply on two counts: First, that wasn't really a "patent infringement" - first lawsuit was about trademark infringement - which Lexra arguably was guilty of, but quickly backpedaled, at which point case felt apart. Then MIPS, unhappy with that outcome, launched second, even bigger lawsuit that was technically about patent infringement, but Lexra never actually used the patent in question, and specifically marketed their design as free from lwl/r and swl/r instructions, making the whole thing a theater of absurd going on for years where plaintiff was alleging that Lexra was was yes, not implenting those instructions, but somehow facilitating their clients' emulating those. Hardly that can be called "ended up in court". Whopsie-daisy... "ended up", right...
Providing official Verilog code for an older MIPS core is certainly a massive feat and deserve an applause, but then again there are plenty of other HDL implementations of CPU cores around, MIPS ISA cores included [0]. And patent law have a safe haven for academia [1], so "completely open and free for university use" is just hot air, sorry. Still, it's "official", so there's value in that, of course.
I wasn't around to witness the Lexra situation so I can't/won't contradict your observations.
However, I think there are a few other reasons why MIPS did not ride the wave of mobile like ARM did.
First of all, MIPS Technologies acquired mixed-signal design house Chipidea for $147m and then sold it to Synopsys for $22m after a rocky two-year integration process.
Secondly, MIPS management focused on markets like networking and home entertainment (set-top boxes, digital TVs, etc.) which did not enjoy the explosive growth of mobile.
To address the second part of your comment about MIPSfpga, this is not "an older core". It is a current-generation CPU capable of running Linux. It is used today in the Microchip PIC32 and the Samsung Artik 1 MCUs - two products that were released within the last year. Furthermore, most of these open cores implement MIPS III or IV architectures from two decades ago whereas MIPSfpga is MIPS32 Release 3. In addition, MIPSfpga implements industry-standard interfaces which make the core much easier to use on an FPGA.
Quite literally MIPS Technologies being too busy with this litigation is the only good explanation why it was blind to the real threat: ARM7TDMI taking embedded/telecom market by storm.
Case in point: in the first half of 2001 I worked at Lucent on a board that had something like 288 or more dial up modem channels (this was once a part of Ascend Communications). It had a bunch of specialized Analog Devices chips doing the heavy lifting, a bunch of ARM processors controlling them ... and one MIPS processor doing system housekeeping.
The recently released official MIPS core has a standard bus interface so it will be much easier to extend it in student projects than any of the OpenCores designs.
My housemate and I used to joke about CPUs someday being so cheap that they would "fall out of cereal boxes as the prize."
The STM8, a chip about 5X more powerful than the first computer I owned, has a variant that is under 17 cents in quantity. Doesn't quite qualify as mommy-buy-me-that-cereal prize material, but it's damn close.
The number of 8-bit CPUs sold every year must dwarf the number of 32-bit ones, yes?
If found it a bit difficult to get accurate sales numbers of how all 32-bit embedded processors compare to all 8-bit embedded processors. However, there are still tens of billions of Intel 8051 (introduced in 1980) derived processors/cores/IP shipped every year, so it's safe to assume the whole market is still vast.
Yeah...I get the same handwavey number for ARM & MIPS; its a crazy successful market. And it's clear that 32-bit is the future, for some value of future.
That said, trying just to understand how many 8051 derivatives is almost impossible. There are many dozens of vendors who supply chips, cores & other embedded IP, many of whom don't even call it 8051 any more. There's probably a few tens of them within 100 feet of you. Much less the 20 or so other significant 8-bit families.
It's a shame that hard data is only available from high dollar market research firms, but I suppose they did the legwork and deserve something for the work.
The Danish ministry for Finance has an official macroeconomic model that is used to evaluate policies.
To the best of my knowledge, it includes a small (I think fixed) amount of structural unemployment but anything else is assumed to be transient. We might have some unemployment now, but it's always assumed to right itself after a few years.
We recently had a parliamentary election here in Denmark, and economic models featured rather prominently as arguments on both sides. One particular party would consistently refer to the economic model they used as a "calculator", which obviously in most people's mind is something that cannot be wrong. This went unquestioned and even seems to have caught on.
