What's really funny, is that if they would have marketed it as a 3.5GB card, and then people started to figure out that there was really 4GB of RAM on there, they probably would have gotten better sales of the part through the hardware hack community trying to figure out how to "unlock" it.

it's the same clock. The problem is bus width. 7/8ths of the memory is on an 7x wider bus than that last 1/8th. Thus, the performance loss.

No, just the throughput which is a function of clock * bus width.

You can have all the clock rate in the world, but still get shit performance on a 32-bit bus, which is exactly the problem.

The other effect is that Nvidia gets a nice fat punitive settlement levied against them, which acts as a deterrent from doing this crap again. I think that's the point.

You just gave a nice list of reasons why Apple might want to hire some competent battery engineers.

1. Absent internal knowledge
2. Current products have far lower energy density than other possible batteries
3. All gains currently employed are from software, and that's grown to maturity with diminishing returns setting in.

Yeah, I can't possibly think why they would want to hire some Ph. Ds that know battery technology and start working their own hardware.

Pretty much every car uses fuel injection now, because it is vastly superior in every meaningful way. Carburetors persisted for a while in motorcycle engines, but fuel injection is taking over that market too.

Even corporate dinosaurs that have legacy mainframe operations that go back decades are moving to VM clustering because of the inherent advantages. When I worked for one of these dinosaurs last year, I was walking through the mainframe operations group and someone had a thing printed on the side of her cube extolling that it would take 400 x86 servers to equal their S390. Someone from the VM engineering team had taken a sharpie to it and crossed out the "400 x86 servers" and written on "10 VMware hosts".

It seems that a lot of "big iron" people don't even recognize the existence of the inherent scalability advantages that VMs provide, even though their mainframes have been doing the same thing for decades.

and by "sold" you actually mean "given to with a fat stack of cash". IBM is paying GlobalFoundries to take the semiconductor fab business from IBM.

Yeah, the x86 stack doesn't need that kind of reliability, because of the inexpensiveness of the hardware. If you need that kind of uptime, you buy 3 and put them behind a load balancing scheme. You end up with more capacity, the same reliability, and still less expense. Especially in the world of virtualized server instances.

Thank Jeebus we have those boiling oceans to make clouds then, or we'd never get any precipitation.

Clearly, YOU do not know how evaporation works.

Yeah, because the world has gone to hell in a hand cart from the spontaneous explosions of the wide availability of "bombs" like gasoline cans and propane tanks.

Well, they assemble them. They paid GlobalFoundries $1.5B to take away their chip division last year. The same chip division that advanced the state of the art in semiconductor design to help get the industry to where it is today.

Really though, what "business machines" does IBM make anymore? pSeries? zOS / System390? AS/400? What's the volume on those?

Nobody ever said Elon Musk was a Republican. But you sure knocked the hell out of that straw man.

Yeah, let's not forget the laugher that Obama sent in 2012, which the Democrat-controlled Senate rejected 99-0.

Yes, the GP may have been wrong about not actually submitting a budget in six years. In actuality, submitting budgets that can't even get a single vote from your own party is basically the same thing as not submitting one.

The extinguishing came at the hands of the iPad and Android tablets though. Microsoft didn't get any piece of that, and in fact lost ground.