As you point out, not all birds of a feather stick together. I'm not a Tea Party guy. I'm just not closed minded enough to judge a friend by their politics. If you only have friends that agree with your politics, you are probably narrow minded or take politics too seriously.

Well, I certainly didn't. Actually had a better throughput on my connection than I did the previous day.

Meh :) At the time I was reading, only one other comment in response to the article spelled it properly, and I just figured someone might actually be wondering, as a result.

Oddly, the site is offering to let me moderate you now. But that would be immoderate.

Yes! You're both presenting a perfectly defensible argument against marketing and reinforcing my original point! Because geeks tend to abhor marketing, we dismiss its significance, and are perennially gobsmacked as to why an intrinsically emotional, manipulatable species is so susceptible to emotional manipulation.

So long as humanity is what it is, reason will only ever get you so far. You either need to blow the doors off with a staggeringly amazing thing, or come to terms with the fact that every single entity who might care about your thing has feelings, and bending those feelings in your favor can work wonders.

It's not all bad, though; emotional manipulation works under much the same constraints. Unless you're a Level 80 Snake Oil Salesman with a hat full of luck, you're going to have a very hard time making your thing last if it doesn't live up to the hype--and your reputation will suffer for it.

Has the United States of America become a member of The Totalitarian Club ?

Yes. Each President has been moving in this direction more and more, but Obama has managed to overreach even more than those before him. Take the IRS, for instance. I personally know of people who have been getting involved with Tea Party politics and now are getting audited. Like their politics or not (it doesn't matter), that is totalitarianism, which means the next time a GOP'er gets in, he can do the same thing. It isn't a good time to be an American.

It's pretty straightforward, to my mind. With the exception of all but the most staggering technological advancements, widespread adoption of new technology typically requires:

1. a sound implementation,
2. a robust support infrastructure, and
3. an effective marketing campaign.

Geeks, for a variety of reasons, tend to respect the first, grok the second, and abhor the third. I personally believe it's what drives our perpetual cycle of incredulity on this subject--because we so detest the last part of this equation, we refuse to see its importance in getting all those squishy, distracted, emotional bags of water to adopt cool new stuff.

NFC has never had the effective marketing campaign in the US, and only kinda had the support infrastructure. The iPhone has incredible inertia on the marketing front, and Apple have clearly done the legwork on building a good starting lineup of financial institutions and retailers for Apple Pay. It remains to be seen whether this'll be sufficient to make NFC catch on, but it's easily the closest we've come to covering all three of the bases above.

However, it takes a really fast car to stay on the other side of the planet.

No, no. It's patriotism. Community ownership is COMMUNISM, and totally un-American. It says right there in the Bible and the Constitution, that the individual profit is sacred. Besides, no fat-cat wants to live in Green Bay, where you get sucked dry by 12 pound vampire mosquitoes in summer and get your nads frozen off in winter.

I'm pretty sure that a factory owned retail outlet would provide pretty much the same level of service as an independently owned dealership.

>True... However the dealership model is one of the few decent middle class jobs creator in the country that doesn't require a lot of education and/or certification.

It used to be, but sadly that is no longer true. The owner makes good money, and so do the parts manager, shop manager and sales manager. Sales droids, for the most part, don't make a living wage and don't last very long, with the exception of maybe 10% of them. Parts guys don't make squat. The mechanics make a good middle-class income, but that work needs to be done anyway whether at the dealership or a private shop. Also, being a mechanic these days takes an AA degree and lots of certifications.

If car companies owned the retail outlets, it would all be pretty much the same, except the owner wouldn't be getting rich. If one guy owns half the Ford dealerships in the state, how is that better than Ford Motor Co. owning them?

from what i understand of the definition of "customer", a "customer" means "someone who is paying for a service". here, there's no payment involved, therefore there is no contract of sale. i would imagine that it's fairly safe to say that we're most definitely *not* quotes customers of google quotes.

if on the other hand these individuals are actually _paying_ google for service and are not receiving a response, _then_ i could understand.

You were probably joking, but for anyone who is really confused, it's coronal mass ejection. The solar flare thing that was supposed to affect us this afternoon (in the USA).

Now they have the guide printed on the box but I can remember when i was a kid they didn't.

Some off them had maps at least as far back as the '50s, and probably much further.

A classic was the "Whitman Sampler" - an assortment of their products with a handy map. In addition to being a tasty and relatively low-priced collection of their products, it let a family divide them up according to their individual preferences, and gave you the names of each, so you could (at least hypotheically) buy boxes of just the ones you like.

(I say hypothetically because I never saw boxes of the individual candies being carried in the stores that sold the samplers.)

I've a very good idea that RAM prices are artificially inflated, that the fab plants are poorly managed, that the overheads are unnecessarily high because of laziness and the mentality in the regions producing RAM.

I'm absolutely certain that 15nm-scale RAM on sticks the same size as sticks used today would cost not one penny more but would have a capacity greater than I've outlined.

It could be done tomorrow. The tools all exist since the scale is already used. The silicon wafers are good enough, if they can manage chips 4x and 9x the size of a current memory chip with next to zero discards, then creating the far smaller dies (so you can discard more chips and still get the same absolute yield) is not an issue. It would reduce idle time for fabs, as fabs are currently run semi-idled to avoid the feast/famine cycle of prior years but 15nm would let them produce other chips in high demand, soaking up all the extra capacity.

What you end up with is less waste, therefore lower overheads, therefore higher profit. The chip companies like profit. They're not going to pass on discounts, you getting a thousand times the RAM for the same price is discount enough!

Not really. RAM is only expensive because of the transistor size used. Fab plants are expensive. Packaging is expensive. Shipping is expensive. Silicon is expensive. If you add all that up, you end up with expensive products.

Because fab plants are running very large transistor sizes, you get low yields and high overheads.

Let's see what happens when you cut the transistor size by three orders of magnitude...

For the same size of packaging, you get three orders of magnitude more RAM. So, per megabyte, packaging drops in cost also by three orders of magnitude.

Now, that means your average block of RAM is now around 8 Tb, which is not a perfect fit but it's good enough. The same amount of silicon is used, so there's no extra cost there. The shipping cost doesn't change. As mentioned, the packaging doesn't change. So all your major costs don't change at all.

Yield? The yield for microprocessors is just fine and they're on about the scale discussed here. In fact, you get better. A processor has to work completely. A memory chip also has to work completely, but it's much smaller. If the three round it fail testing, it doesn't affect that one. So you end up with around a quarter of the rejection rate per unit area of silicon to a full microprocessor.

So you've got great yield, same overheads, but... yes... you can use the fab plant to produce ASICs and microprocessors when demand for memory is low, so you've not got idle plant. Ever.

The cost of this memory is therefore exactly the same as the cost of a stick of conventional RAM of 1/1000th the capacity.

Size - Exactly the same as the stick of RAM.

Power budget - of no consequence. When the machine is running, you're drawing from mains power. When the machine is not running, you are refreshing the dirty bits of memory only, nothing else. And 99.9% of the time, there won't be any because sensible OS' like Linux sync before a shutdown. The 0.1% of the time, the time when your server has been hit by a power cut, the hard drive is spun down to save UPS and the main box is in the lowest possible energy mode, that's when this sort of system matters. Even on low energy mode, buffers will need flushing, housekeeping will need to be done, transactions will need to be completed. This system would give you all that.

And the time when the machine is fully powered, fully up? Your hard drive spends most of its time still spun down. Not for power, although it'll chew through a fair bit - mechanical devices always do and the high-speed drives being proposed will chew through far, far more. They'll be spun down because a running hard drive suffers rapid deterioration. Can you believe hard drives only last 5 years??! Keep the damn thing switched off until last minute, then do continuous write. Minimizes read head movement (there's practically none), minimizes bearing wear-and-tear, eliminates read head misalignment (a lot of times, you can write the entire disk in one go, so what the hell do you care if the tracks are not perfectly in line with the ones they're replacing?) and (by minimizing read head time over the drive) minimizes the risk of a head crash.

I reckon this strategy should double the expected lifetime of drives, so take the cost of one 10 Tb drive and calculate how much power you'd need to consume extra for the memory in order for the memory's power budget to exceed the value of what you're doing.

Oh, and another thing. Because I'm talking memory sticks, you only need to buy one, subsequent drives of the same or lower capacity would not need to have memory there. You could simply migrate it. RAM seems to hold up ok on old computers, so you can probably say that the stick is good for the original drive and the replacement. That halves the cost of the memory per drive.

So, no, I don't see anything unduly optimistic. I think your view of what the companies could be doing is unduly pessimistic and more in line with what the chip companies tell you that you should think than what the chip companies can actually do.