You obviously can not build a cohesive society just by hoping people will want to be good, they have to have a generally shared understanding of what it means to be good.

I meant not good compared with what was available elsewhere, i.e., actual x86 CPUs. It didn't emulate privileged modes, so none of your operating systems worked, it required Windows NT, and it only provided emulation for Win32 x86 binaries, and it did not emulate all facilities either. Independent benchmarks are not easy to come by, but even the few results published by DEC were not fantastic. A 500MHz Alpha (likely EV6) would achieve maybe little better performance than a 200MHz Pentium (P5, not PPro)! EV6 did 2.66x specint95/MHz that Pentium MMX 200 achived, and 2.5x the frequency. Natively it would havehave been 5.32x faster on those benchmarks, but it was a little over 1.x. This is not the 40-60% performance claimed of the trivial byte benchmark result, this is 20% performance at best.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3214997_FX32_a_prof...

The slip was the original development AFAIK. HP later restarted a failed process shrink I think, but I can't remember if they finally got that done in the end.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RS/6000

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1fz29tx/r...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_IRIS#MIPS

https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-9000_720_730_750.html

Apple (or NeXT) were never vertically integrated back then. In the last 6 years with Apple making their own CPUs for OSX you could call them a vertically integrated UNIX shop. Not minicomputer though, which is from my post you replied to. Apple was not a vertically integrated vendor that survived bottom-up attack, they attacked Intel from bottom up via mobile/smartphone cores in a similar way Intel did to the minicomputers.

Alpha had no fundamental differences that would have enabled it to avoid the same problem as the others IMO.

> I wasn't around at the time, so I don't know what availability and pricing actually looked like, but unlike the other RISC platforms,

No that's not true, other RISCs had similar, even before Alpha was on the designboard. They all did RISC workstations, Sun, SGI, even HP and IBM. IBM most famously went into PowerPC with Apple and Motorola early on, and then also did CPUs for several games consoles.

IBM probably of all of them understood the commoditization fight and they tried to put up a fight, but even they couldn't keep ahead of it. Alpha couldn't have.

> Alpha was actually available on PC-like systems, with PCI and ISA busses, and x86 emulation at the firmware layer, allowing regular PC peripherals like VGA cards to work. Windows and, significantly, Linux, had pretty superb support for Alpha.

Just too expensive to produce for what it did. Why would you use it for a Windows or Linux machine if you could do the same with a Pentium or K6 that actually ran your games and word processors and other stuff.

EV7 and EV8 development did not go well either, costs and complexity was blowing out, EV7 slipped 18 months and planned 130nm shrink was not able to hit performance targets. EV8 was enormous and expensive totally unsuited to mass market commodity bottoms-up path of Intel, and exemplifies their retreat into high end niche rather than accept and embrace commoditization.

AMD licensed the EV6 bus, but of course there was no socket/pin compatibility between AMD and Alpha parts. So they still didn't have commodity motherboards, though that would only be one small part of the puzzle if they did have.

One does still survive though, that's IBM's POWER / AIX. Still actively developed, though there is the feeling of 'when' rather than 'if' for them too.

In any case the economics were more or less the same as Alpha as for the others. They couldn't support integrated silicon manufacturing. It wasn't even just the manufacturing (which could be outsourced although arguably not as competitively as integrated shops like Intel until TSMC really hit its stride). Or the logic and physical design. But the software development and ecosystem support costs were ballooning too. Alpha like the rest of them just never made sense unless they could make competitive cheap systems that were compatible, and by the time efforts like Windows ports and x86 emulation came along, it was already too late.

Before Intel's decade of humiliation with their 10nm fiasco and before Zen, AMD had a hell of a time getting ISVs and IHVs on board in the server space with producing them, certifying them, etc.,. Which wasn't entirely irrational, Intel was much more mature in a lot of ways in their hardware and software stacks, they were a big company, perceived as less risky, etc.

So it's not too surprising that those companies didn't jump to Opteron. Some did consider it, mind you. Though AMD went through doldrums of their own after Opteron (with Core2/Nehalem-ish era) where they shat the bed with their cores and were pretty handily beaten by Intel for quite a long while until Zen came along -- so that is possibly some vindication for the risk adverse by not going all in on Opteron.

Intel had their foundries and CPU cores paid for by video gamers and receptionists and students typing up their assignments and people looking at porn at 14.4kbps. Servers and workstations were pretty much gravy and every year there was less their systems couldn't do compared to the big iron.

Those computers pretty much sold themselves, contrast with every $20k workstation or $100k server that the unix guys had to explain why they were worth 5x the grey box on the desk.

SGI was struggling to make their MIPS chips and were pretty quickly finished off when nvidia started making GPUs. Itanium originated at HP as a PA-RISC replacement. They owned DEC Alpha when they killed it but arguably DEC didn't have a big base of legacy software at that point. IBM and Sun stood for a lot longer, mainly I would say largely due to locked in customers/data on Oracle and DB2 databases and proprietary software, rather than the merits of their hardware.

If Itanium never happened, 64-bit x86 server chips would have done the same thing to MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, PowerPC. Might have happened even sooner from Intel since they allegedly sandbagged efforts in that direction to protect Itanium.

This man has sixteen hundred videos of riding up and down elevators and is still going strong. Amazing. I love how Grandma was willing to ride random elevators and feature in his videos if it meant she could spend time with her eccentric grand son.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-talks-land-r...

> What was their response?

Not sure. As far as I know the US is very supportive of SpaceX for space supremacy and Australia would almost certainly go along with what the US administration asks. If it hasn't happened yet it's more likely because SpaceX didn't/couldn't do it than Australia denying the request.

You've been lied to by your own ruling class. What else have they been lying to you about, I wonder?

In my opinion, it seems to be you who are ascribing human traits to these things. Whether it's by misunderstanding or you've been taken in by their mimicry or whatever it is. A hammer does not have agency because you tried to hit a nail with it and it hit your thumb instead. The hammer didn't tell you it was afraid it couldn't do that. The hammer didn't have a life or personhood or lack of respect. Neither does a video game that doesn't let you win all the time and do what you want. They are just tools, chatbots, whatever. A corporation deciding it doesn't want to have its chat bots engage with rude or angry users is not some great moral dilemma of our time.

In what way do you believe you are being deceived or it is "pretending" to you?

> > it's explicitly mimicry.

> But that's not what a rational person wants from them.

Non sequitur even if true (and I would like to see your reasoning for what you think a rational person does want).

> > This is no profound discovery or conspiracy theory here

> Weird strawman.

That is not what strawman means. I can try to help you understand why if you need me to.

> > the first thing many people will ever do with AI is see what happens when they are rude or contrary to it.

> Perhaps, but so what?

Please follow the thread with the other person I was replying to.

> > Dealing with that must be just about the the number one test in chat bot / AI design

> Only for foolish authoritarians who want to remotely insert their morality into an interaction between a user and an inanimate tool that's none of their business. No harm is done to a clanker by swearing at it or insulting it.

There are certainly a lot of authoritarians who want to control what others do with their models. What do you believe is authoritarian about a corporation not wanting be part of rude conversations?

> But things have gotten better in my view ... when I call out these things for being stupid effing clankers, they no longer respond with ad hominem scolding; rather they generally acknowledge their error (and my frustration -- they use that word a lot in response to vulgarity), note the limitations of being a clanker, and attempt to make a correction. That's what a rational person wants from a tool, not emulating/mimicking/pretending to be an offendable person.

I see. And you believe you speak for rational people?