Also, didn't Intel exit the flash market a while back, spinning off its flash division along with ST Micro to Numonyx, which later got acquired by Micron? I thought that the whole idea then was that memory was so unprofitable that it wasn't worth keeping it as an albatross on corporate margins.
Also, memory fabs are different from the ones used for making processors/controllers - it's not like fabs that don't make more Atoms or Celerons will be repurposed for SSDs. So how does it make sense for Intel to get into this? Micron I can understand, since memory is their prime business. But Intel? It makes as much sense for them to be making this as to be in the DRAM market
Typically, the endurance of any non-volatile memory (read flash/hard drives) is measured per sector/block, where the latter is the smallest number of erasable bytes/words/quad-words that an erase operation can erase. Typically, for flash, that number is 1-10 thousand cycles. That number is eroded as one increases the number of bits per cell.
Like I mention below in a response to the GP, if you have it so that every byte is written only once and any overwrites happen to other bytes/sectors, you can avoid multiple erase cycles and thereby maximize the life of such an SSD.
I believe what they do is spread the data all over the memory, to mitigate the issue of a small part of the memory being heavily bombarded w/ writes while 90% of it never gets touched. I'd imagine that Copy-on-Write filesystems, such as ZFS, would enable one to do it more effectively, since no actual data ever gets deleted, and only the metadata info is changed, and the changed data is written to another portion of disk. If this is done effectively, then the disk utilization is increased, and endurance issues don't come into play at all.
Otherwise, you are right - cell design does seem to be hitting a wall, and I don't see silicon getting much smaller. Certainly not for price decreases. Also, multiple bits per cell don't lend themselves to too many write cycles, being as unstable as they are.
Crimea was a legitimate claim of Russia - historically, it had always been a part of Russia, even after Brest-Litovsk made Ukraine independent. It was given to Ukraine on Nikita Krushchev's whim, when few in Russia or Crimea could protest about it.
It's different in the rest of the Ukraine, where people - whether Russian speaking or Ukrainian, don't wanna be Russians. Since the 1990s, there has been a lot of migration b/w the former Soviet republics - Kazakhs returning to Kazakhstan, Uzbeks to Uzbekistan, Ukrainians to Ukraine & Russians to Russia. So it's fair to say that the people of Ukraine don't want to be either a part of Russia, or a Russian client state. However, they're willing to go slow on joining NATO, given how explosive an issue that is, vis a vis Russia.
However, NATO is an outdated organization, that lost its purpose when the Soviet Union came apart. With the Warsaw Pact, NATO should also have disbanded. Since the 90s, all Western countries have been disarming & seeking the 'peace dividend', which is incompatible w/ NATO's charter of the entire organization going to war if one of them is attacked. If Russia was upset @ say, Latvia, and sent troops into Riga, would the US launch missiles across the Bering Strait? If no, why give countries like them false hopes that NATO would protect them? Given the stupid interventions that NATO has done, like Bosnia & Kosovo, it's past the point where it was a force for good.
However, the gaps ain't as big. Going from 32-bit to 64-bit has meant crossing the 4GB barrier in memory. However, it would only be necessary to go from 32 to 64 when - and IF - 1.844674407×10^19 is the minimum you have in memory.
The IPv6 analogy is not a good one. Since in reality, IPv6 is an overlaid 64 on 64 bit address, as opposed to a flat 128 bit address, as 32-bit IPv4 was. I know that IPv6 sounds a whole lot, but when you look at the strict assignments & rules that have been placed on various address ranges by both IETF and IANA, it turns out to be far fewer network/subnet addresses, since ISPs can't touch the lower 64-bits of the address. So IPv4 -> IPv6 is hardly an analogy that would be equivalent to 32-bit to 128-bit migration.
Even if the past is any guide, it will take 64 transitions before we are ready for 128-bit. Already, on the semiconductor side of things, people are talking about Moore's law hitting its limits, and getting to the point where a transistor is just a handful of atoms, thereby hardly leaving any room for further shrinkage. I do think that OSs will remain 64-bit, while some things, like file systems, may go 128 bit (like ZFS)
Why should Putin be afraid of the West? Everybody knows that since the 90s, the West has been busy disarrming, even as they get involved in stupid wars like Bosnia, Kosovo, as well as nationbuilding projects in Afghanistan & Iraq. If he marches troops into even a NATO member, say Latvia, NATO will be exposed for being as feckless as it is.
Real reason is that Russia has been a weakening power, and incurring huge casualties in Afghanistan and Chechnya did nothing for their confidence. If they lose thousands in a war w/ Ukraine, they'd be seriously embarrassed, and any other internal secession movements there, like Tatarstan, could erupt. Which is why they are trying to subvert Donbass into becoming a part of Russia.
The 68008 was discontinued 20 years ago, so this isn't really all that useful even as an educational exercise. Why not pick a current breadboardable, cheap microprocessor and get Linux to run on that? That way, other people can benefit.
Couldn't agree more w/ this one. We all know that Linux can run everywhere, from a calculator to a supercomputer, but there's really nothing impressive about this. When the original 68k was what the first Sun workstations were made of, and therefore ran SunOS. Granted, it was not Linux, but close enough (since things like X11, GNOME, et al do not apply).
In fact, why not pick a BeagleBone, or Raspberry Pi or Arduino - depending on one's attitude about Broadcom vs Atheros vs whoever else is putting a controversial part into the box, put Tiny-Core Linux or something like it on that, and run with it?
They haven't kept Samsung, LG, Sony or others from having their own stores. Not just small shops in malls, but full blown bricks & mortars stores. In case of Samsung, LG & Sony, they sell all their products there - TVs, fridges, phones, you name it. No reason to think that Google would be stopped.
Like the GP said, Google would do well to introduce differentiated products, so that you have low ends for servants & maids, & high ends for MNC executives and tax dodgers.
Rs6000-7000 may be a lot for a normal cellphone, but it's a very good price for a Smartphone. However, mom&pop stores in India probably don't expect customers who are willing to pay that sort of money for phones: they typically get the average maid or servant as customers, who use them for talking, listening to the latest Bollywood hits, taking pictures of anything and... that's it!!! One hardly needs Android or iOS or WP8 for just that!
In India, if someone is looking for a smartphone, they typically would be from the demographic that would shop at the malls. After all, if they are sinking anywhere north of Rs5000 on a phone, they're gonna be very particular about where they're getting it, the service and everything that goes supporting the phone. So usually, they go to a Samsung store and stock on the Galaxies, which are by far the leading smartphone in India. Another thing about this group - since their budget is already up there, they'd prefer a brand name like Samsung to the likes of Micromaxx or Karbonn. Oh, and did I mention - very few of the Micromaxx or Karbonn use capacitive screens: they are mainly resistive, and have very poor touch sensitivity. Which really sucks if one is receiving a call and touching the screen doesn't answer.
If Karbonn or Micromaxx wanna make inroads, that phone needs to come down to the Rs2000 or so vicinity.
I too saw that touchpads didn't work, which is what delayed my migration from Windows 8 to PC-BSD. I had to buy a separate mouse and stick it into a USB port. But I like it this way - under Windows 8, touchpad constantly came in the way, and even touchfreeze didn't fix things completely. So given how buggy the touchpad support could have been, I'm actually glad that it's not supported at all.
Particularly the current generation of touchpads where a single touchpad covers both the touchpad as well as the left & right click buttons. Oh, and without any button to disable touchpads altogether.
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.