The summary is inaccurate, or at least confusing. The summary says "lasers that can shine light over the full spectrum of visible colors", but the article says that this is three monochromatic spikes, red, green, blue, which together appear white. It also says that the choice of colors is tunable... but tunable lasers aren't new.

The summary also implies that it is "a" laser, but the article makes it clear that what they did is make three separate lasers on the same substrate (specifically "three parallel segments, each supporting laser action in one of three elementary colors.")

Android/IOS tablets do not count when measuring PC OS market share - they are not classified as "personal computers" and cannot be factored in to market share statics.

Actually some of the various agencies do count them. They also seem to have some level of substitution effect primarily decreasing usage and thus increasing length of the buying cycle. But we are have also seen something like 100m mostly stop using PCs, getting their needs met by tablets and phones.

But that just shrinks the overall market, it doesn't much change who dominates that market.

There are essentially 4 measures of dominance that are commonly used:

a) Unit market share
b) Sales share (dollar weighted market share)
c) profit share
d) controlling the direction of the industry

(a) Android /iOS substitution is a serious threat. A huge number of people who would otherwise want newer PCs don't.
(b) Is rapidly collapsing while and Microsoft may fall under Apple soon in the non-server market
(c) Apple (OSX) has been dominant here forever ranging from 85-91% of profit share for $1k plus laptops and now has around the same margins for all end user PC sales.
(d) I think its pretty clear Microsoft has lost this and is thrashing.

I don't see dominance.

For a car analogy, saying Android/IOS tablets sales are dethroning Windows is like stating a surge in bicycle sales is stealing market share from Ford pick-ups.

No it isn't. The average price on an iOS phone for example is approaching double the average price of a Windows PC and the unit volumes are getting close to equal. The analogy is more like Ford vs. Dodge pickups.

All statistics that you can find on various sites show that each of Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1 individually hold more market share than all non-Windows OSes combined.

I don't know where you are getting that. Embedded Linux crushes Android and Android crushes Windows. iOS is getting close to Windows.

I can argue the Marlins are the dominant baseball team if I insist on only counting teams in Miami. But once I realize teams outside Miami play against the Miami team I have to deal with the complexity of the market. Windows right now is dominant in the niche of $250-700 keyboard based systems. Go either above or below price or drop the keyboard based and things look quite different.

Jury nullification is not a legal defense in any US court room. Jury nullification has been legally challenged at every court level in the US and each time declared illegal. Jury nullification would inject politics into the legal proceedings. Look closely at the trials involving white on black crimes in the south 40 years ago with all white jurors to see what jury nullification looks like. Snowden sealed his fate when he published information on foreign intelligence operations. He systematically violated the Espionage act. You don't walk away from this charge. Like it or not the US is not the only country that conducts intrusive foreign intelligence operations with little regard for other countries laws. As long as this fact holds true the government is going to treat breaches of national security in matters related to foreign operations very seriously and make sure the penalties are substantial.

Android/IOS tablets do not count when measuring PC OS market share - they are not classified as "personal computers" and cannot be factored in to market share statics. I'm not arguing that Android/IOS tables are eating into PC market share - they absolutely are. But that just shrinks the overall market, it doesn't much change who dominates that market. For a car analogy, saying Android/IOS tablets sales are dethroning Windows is like stating a surge in bicycle sales is stealing market share from Ford pick-ups. I assure you, Scwinn has nothing to do with Ford's slipping position in the light-duty truck market.

All statistics that you can find on various sites show that each of Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1 individually hold more market share than all non-Windows OSes combined. On some sites, Windows 7 by itself holds more market share than all other Windows versions AND all non-Windows OSes combined. No non-Windows OS even comes near 10% market share.

"Reign supreme" means to dominate. Windows CLEARLY dominates PC OS market share. To claim otherwise just shows your ignorance.

Because 0.1 exaflops is still "exascale", but not "exaflops"... :)

Paul B.

For most specific problems thrown at supercomputers, you can go 30 times faster with a custom hardware architecture baked into silicon

To go 30 times fast for general purpose supercomputing, you use the latest silicon (2X) and more chips (15X) and come up with a super new interconnect to make it not suck. This would involve making some chips that support low latency IPC in hardware.

They are free to send me a few billion dollars, I'll get right on it and deliver a 30X faster machine and I'l even use some blue LEDs on the front panel.

TFA is a bit light on details, but (having heard of GaN before), it is good at handling large voltages/currents, and they are probably talking about more efficient power supplies (saving 20%, apparently), not replacing Si in logic chips. Or maybe integrating power conversion onto processor die itself, but the latter is still made of good old CMOS. Currently, from what I've heard, a good chunk of pins on your processor are used to supply power -- if you think of it, 30W processor with 3V bias needs to get 10A of current.

Paul B.

Genetically-modified papaya was developed in 1975.

I don't think that's true. Linux is a huge percentage of the x86 ecosystem. For example on Azure the cloud platform with far and away the most Microsoft depending on how you could Windows images are somewhere between 1/6th and 1/3rd of the total images. So even in Microsoft's own cloud they mostly sell Linux. An x86 standard that doesn't support Linux won't be an x86 standard. What it would be is a Microsoft hardware standard and that would at best fragment the x86 architecture. They remember how the Microsoft-Intel-Western Digital standard beat IBM's Microchannel, I suspect they don't want to make the same mistake.

So no I don't think its the laws.

Yes I think they would have. Enterprise users clearly use smart phones. They are heavy tablet consumers. They have lots of laptops. There is no reason that ubiquitous computing couldn't have been a superior model for them than buying lots of applications, data sharing, and worrying about compatibility as they undergo complex upgrade cycles for various devices:

Does version 6 of by web BI tool use the same data format as version 3.2 of my phone based BI tool, version 7.6 of my tablet based sales management tool and version 4.5 of my desktop tool? I want to upgrade my browser and that's going to force me to upgrade the web tool....

You can see how having one app across the board solves that. I think Steve Ballmer was absolutely right (heresy to say that on /. I know) in believing the alternative to ubiquitous computing wouldn't work for enterprise.

last line should read Microsoft is way ahead of Linux on thin client because of how naive X11 is about toolkits.