Looking at Shield Tab reviews, the K1 certainly appears to have the processing power but actually putting it to use takes a heavy toll on the battery with the SoC alone drawing over 6W under full-load: in Anandtech's review, battery life drops from 4.3h to 2.2h when they disable the 30fps cap in GFXBench.

The K1's processing power looks nice in theory but once combined with its power cost, it does not sound that good anymore.

But the comment I was replying to was about Broadwell-K which is the desktop variant. Shaving a few watts on a desktop CPU is not going to get you much battery life even if you have an UPS. Most people who will buy Broadwell-K will be using it with a discrete GPU too.

While Iris Pro performs quite well when you turn down graphics low enough to fit most of the resources in the 128MB Crystalwell L4 cache, nobody interested in mid-range graphics would be willing to give up this much quality for decent frame rates. Once you exceed that 128MB, even low-end discrete GPUs with GDDR5 take the lead. Broadwell's four extra units are not going to change this by much.

If Intel released chips with an upgraded 512MB Crystalwell and twice the L4 bandwidth, then that would nuke low-end GPUs and possibly start hurting mid-range.

The P4 was getting destroyed by AMD in benchmarks, the 65nm die shrink failed to translate into significant clock gains and interest in power-efficient desktop CPUs was starting to soar so Intel had little choice but to execute their backup plan to save face: bring their newer and better-performing next-gen Core2 mobile CPU design to the desktop.

Broadwell only brings minor performance improvements to desktops and shaves a few watts along the way. If Intel decided to scrap Broadwell-K, or perhaps produce them in limited quantities due to launch dates getting too close to Skylake for full-scale production, few tears will be shed.

Since Broadwell-K is not going to launch until half-way through 2015 and Skylake was still on the 2015 roadmap last time I remember seeing one, I would not be surprised if Intel canned Broadwell-K altogether - no point in flooding the market with parts that only have a few months of marketable life in front of them. If Broadwell-K does launch beyond OEMs, it may end up being one of Intel's shortest-lived retail CPUs ever.

In the first Broadwell roadmaps, there were no plans for socketed desktop parts; all mobile and embedded.

Nothing shy of a nearby gamma burst or the eventual day when the sun goes red-giant is likely to end all life on Earth.

But there are a lot of things shy of that that can make life really uncomfortable for us, perhaps terminally so. It's happened 5 times before, to longer-lived species than us.

Don't forget that your insurance company would really like to get their spy dongle onto your ODB II port, too. So this HUD is really the third usage for the ODB II port, the first of course being the diagnostics that it was designed for. How soon before we have ODB-splitters?

I'm sure your insurance company would like their spy dongle to be the only thing plugged into your ODB II port while driving, especially if the only other available driving-time plugin was a HUD/distraction. But what if other more sensible plugins became available, even safety improving ones, say a breathalyzer lockout...

As long as the guesture input subsystem isn't connected to the in-car weapons subsystem.

Many analog scopes had many more trigger options than that.

But with modern low-end scopes like Rigol's DS1xxxZ-series featuring relatively deep memory, 20k waveforms per second trigger rates, intensity grading, up to 1GSPS sampling rate (single channel), relatively easy hacks to enable all the options, segmented memory to record events, pass/fail mask, etc., the 10-20 second startup time on an instrument most people will usually use for hours at a time is well worth it.

Nowhere near as bad as Agilent's Windows-based bench multimeters that take nearly two minutes to boot... but even that is fine since they need ~10 minutes of warm-up time to fully stabilize before you can get the full 6.5-digits precision.

Boot time in lab instruments is a silly thing to worry/bitch about when most instruments have long warm-up times and should ideally be powered up 10-30 minutes before use anyway.

I certainly believe that there are new things under the sun. I just don't believe that there are as many of them as our trendsetting media would like us to think. Come to think of it, I'll bet that the truly new things under the sun are seldom well covered. I guess Sturgeon's Law applies.

Or the paraphrase, "History repeats itself because nobody listened the first time." (In practice, the singular "first time" is insufficient.)

L3 cannot deliver the data to Verizon since there is not enough connectivity between L3 and Verizon to hand the data over at the interfaces where L3 is attempting to do so.

Verizon does not want to put all their bandwidth eggs in L3's basket just to accommodate Netflix so they want Netflix to either peer directly or force L3 and its other CDNs to re-route traffic through other Verizon peers.

Depending too heavily on a single upstream provider is not sound business practice and Verizon wants to avoid getting tied up in that sort of relationship with L3 mostly due to Netflix.

It would also add ~2mm to thickness and 10-20 grams for the sliding mechanism, the keyboard, stiffening structures and bottom cover.

And there is the sliding mechanism as an additional mechanical and electrical point of failure.

I prefer physical keyboards over on-screen as far as typing goes but the design and cost compromises, not so much.

Verizon's subscribers would be able to get the content they want if Netflix routed traffic to Verizon through other peers than L3.

Verizon upgrading their connectivity with L3 to infinity and beyond would not be good business practice since Verizon would be screwed the second Netflix decides to change their transit mix to move away from L3 and then Verizon would have to start over.

It makes sense that Verizon would want to force Netflix to diversify its peering.

The problem with the 'fastest' route is that it may not be the CHEAPEST route.

If L3 really wanted to relieve pressure on their bottlenecked links to Verizon instead of trying to turn this into a PR exercise to make Verizon cave in, they could re-route traffic through Verizon's other peers with under-loaded links but that could cost L3 more money and possibly cause peering disputes with those other peers.