Replies to post #404 on Transmeta (Semiconductor) (TMTA)

[weaksidehelp]

Steak, I have had good luck with MS Media Player on our machines; use it pretty often. Sorry you couldn't listen to an excellent presentation.

The talk by David Ditzel is of course old, but not dated. It provides a technical overview of the Crusoe and code morphing and a glimpse of the extremely high level of programming sophistication that was required. My guess is that we would be quite amazed by the amount and quality of source code written by the team, and the difficulty of debugging. Has anyone ever before written code to operate between a chipset and an operating system? My guess is that here is where a mind like that of Linus T. proved very instrumental in charting the design.

I aluded to it in the earlier post, but I suspect it would take a "Manhattan Project" approach (or whatever MS called their project to develop IE in warp time) for Intel to develop similar code. Even if they did so, it appears that a resulting hardware software chip from Intel would read on the TMTA patent. If the hardware/software/ morphing approach is the path to the future of computing, TMTA should get to walk the path alone, at least for the short and mid term.

Regards, wsh

[Koikaze]

Steak, in retrospect I probably shouldn't have been surprised by yesterday's run-up. After all, it was the first of February ... the time, at last, when we are looking forward to volume production.

The other day I mentioned the European Union. I was half joking, but I gathered from your response that you didn't think there was any justification for my comment. What led me to my assertion is I've learned the EU has a regulation allowing it to penalize huge corporations up to 10% of their international gross revenue for monopolistic practices. I think it's unlikely that they'll ever apply it, but I like the idea.

Now the EU is working on a regulation to prevent unauthorized cookies. Here's a link to Ari Kaplan's comments on the topic. I'm afraid the American government has long since sold its citizens out. I hope Europe sticks to its guns.

http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s%253D1867%2526a%253D21756,00.asp

Here's an excerpt that I liked: "... In addition to prohibiting data tracking using cookies, Web bugs and other tools, the directive could affect targeted e-mail and similar unsolicited advertisements. The practice of collecting personal data would also change by requiring that users opt in to, rather than opt out of, information-gathering systems."

Fred