If they went 150% yesterday, and another 150% today, then within a month they will have stockpiled all the RAM in the world.

I thought that Singapore was ordering them not to allow the government to send spoof messages, and thought, "How refreshing!" Nope.

By all the gods . . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Unfortunately a certain percentage of those 'village idiots' are from families rich and powerful enough to fund that sort of research. This is the same issue with bio-weapons, which no longer require the resources of a large government to create. What formerly required bleeding edge labs and billions of dollars can now be done by some grad students using surplessed equipment bought on eBay. Eventually some PETA trust fund brat will decide Earth would be better off with several billion fewer human beings and realize that they could make it happen.

I'm saying they may not be given the same offers that the suppliers were formerly giving them. If a supplier sees that nVidia will absolutely buy a huge supply of memory, then they will demand a comparable commitment from other customers. They will divert capacity to the customers that are willing to make the biggest and most certain commitments.

So Lenovo may have had to commit to bigger orders, or just be left out of getting enough to keep shipping their systems at all. If supply is constrained *someone's* orders are getting delayed, and the bigger orders get priority.

To the extent it might be a gamble, it could be a very short term gamble. Companies try to adhere to 'just in time' supply chain and carry very little advance supply, since investors heavily penalize carrying any sort of inventory over time. So as one example put it, maybe they extended stock from 30 days to 45 days, assuming that the memory market won't get better for at least a couple of months, which may be what the suppliers are forecasting.

The thing with Notepad isn't that it's good... rather that it's everywhere.

Notepad is for when you're working but not on your machine. Not everyone's work flow is going to be 100% local and you probably won't have permission to install something on someone elses server.

No matter what the version, what the patch level, what the fuck is wrong with it, notepad is there and notepad works.

Sounds like MS are working on the last part unfortunately.

It'll be three thumbs up shortly at the rate they're going.

Completely agree with your post BTW.

Buy British Beef, Mad Cow disease is still safer than what's in the local stuff.

So, it's basically like a Cane Toad then?

I personally didn't like Curiosity Stream when I tried it years ago. The docos always felt a little too close to entertainment for my liking.

My favourite streaming service is The Great Courses. It had a small hiccup when it rebranded as Wondrium for a few years and merged its content with Magellan etc, but the users complained loudly and the company went back to their core competency. I have no problem giving them my money even though I will never get through all the courses they have on offer.

Why would we want private industry to build it? They're already fucking us over six ways from Sunday, do we really need another way to get shafted?

The high speed rail in most of Europe is owned and run by the country's central government and is generally extremely good. The high speed rail in China is the best on the planet, owned and run by the central government. In Japan and a couple of other countries it's managed by private companies which report to, and take direction from, the central governments.

Or perhaps this is just one of those things we're uniquely incapable of doing, like providing healthcare or keeping control of our military spending.

Yes, I've seen what happens when government owns and runs the rails, we've ridden the trains in Spain, Italy and Portugal, and they're outstanding.

The point is to explicitly extend android to be more 'laptop/desktopy'. So it's still a linux distribution, and looks like it won't be *really* distinct from Android....

They might not have had a choice. The memory vendors getting sweetheart deals from AI supply chain might require other markets to increase their commitment or get nothing.

So the choices might be either stockpile or not have any supply at all for their mainstream product. It's worth a risk of overpaying for memory when you have no other viable option.

Free is a fiction that exists exclusively in the minds of stupid people.