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Comment Chip prices could also go up (Score 1) 22

While the article focuses specifically on memory prices, the AI boom could also cause PC CPU and GPU prices to go up which affects everyone. Currently fabrication at TSMC and Samsung are limited with companies like NVidia and AMD booking orders years in advance. To chase profits, NVidia and AMD will shift more of their orders to AI chips if they haven't already done so. That means fewer consumer CPUs and GPUs and thus higher prices for consumers as there may be shortages.

Comment Re:Smartphones are overrated (Score 1) 22

I don't see how it would help the situation to buy cheaper phones. The issue is RAM prices are going up. That affects expensive flagship and cheap phones alike. In fact, you may not be able to buy a cheap phone as manufacturers are going to prioritize selling the flagship phones first as that gains them the most profit.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 158

Why do you need power? How badly designed are your roads that a small 3 cylinder 1000cc engine car can't safely reach highway speeds on the onramp? You want a racing car fine, but don't pretend that power is something anyone actually *needs* to commute to work.

I don't know where you live but where I live we have these things called "hills" where a Kei car might struggle. Especially when I have these other things called "friends" in the car with me. Back in high school, I had a Toyota Corolla which is larger than Kei cars. The first time I was driving with friends up a moderate hill, they were surprised when I turned off the AC so I could get enough HP to maintain speed up the hill. Because suddenly slowing down in lanes with 18 wheelers and huge ass trucks is what some would call "dangerous."

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 158

That's not the main reason. Kei cars are meant for specific purposes and destinations. The trucks are meant to be light duty work trucks first and commuting second. The cars are meant for commuting in densely packed urban environments. In Japan and other countries, there are specific regulations for them. Since they were made for specific countries, this is why pass they don't pass safety requirements of US roads.

Conforming to existing safety regulations would be a challenge, and it would be require Congress to write new legislation written just for them. Personally, I would advocate Kei trucks being built as farms, large factories, warehouses, etc could use them, and many that have been imported for that purpose. For example, a Kei truck could easily haul a round bale of hay. If it gets stuck in the mud, just get a few people and lift it out. :P

Comment Re:Say no to emulation, bridges, etc. (Score 1) 43

The fact is the M1 was a fantastic product and you seem to be unwilling to acknowledge that software emulation is actually insanely fucking fast.

That is a lie. The Mx series chips use both software AND hardware for emulation. Specifically Mx chips have memory assist circuitry that assist in translating x86 memory instructions. Rosetta 2 software is still needed to make it work but without the hardware, it would be slow and inefficient.

Your argument is that somehow Apple was one of the few to have "insanely fucking fast" software emulation for x86. Seriously? Of all the past open source and proprietary software attempts at x86 emulation, Apple just happens to build fast emulation on their first try. OR being vertically integrated, Apple incorporated some hardware assist at the chip level to help them as they design their own chips?

Precisely zero people here are talking about mobile gaming. Gaming is not something you do while taking a shit. Come back on topic.

The topic is emulation. You: NO TRUE SCOTSMAN!!!

I will admit to this one. It is No True Scotsman. And go fuck anyone with a rake who equates playing on your fucking phone to the gaming industry. Hint: The industry itself separates these two for a reason.

So you admit using fallacious arguments and then get angry when people point that out to you. Your argument is gaming companies should ignore devices that generate twice the revenue of PC games because you call anything not PC gaming, "niche".

Comment Re:Linus is right, but this is really not news (Score 1) 37

Win9x and Win2k (and the other NT descendants) are fundamentally different operating systems. In general, NT had a much more robust kernel, so system panics were and remain mainly hardware issues, or, particularly in the old days, dodgy drivers (which is just another form of hardware issue). I've seen plenty of panics on *nix systems and Windows systems, and I'd say probably 90-95% were all hardware failures, mainly RAM, but on a few occasions something wrong with the CPU itself or with other critical hardware like storage device hardware. There were quite a few very iffy IDE cards back in the day.

The other category of failure, various kinds of memory overruns, have all but disappeared now as memory management, both on the silicon and in kernels, have radically improved. So I'd say these are pretty much extinct, except maybe in some very edge cases, where I'd argue someone is disabling protections or breaking rules to eke out some imagined extra benefit.

Comment Re:So it's not the worst thing (Score 1) 160

" You are suggesting that people should have blamed Trump for COVID, which is doubtful"
the link i provided gave a timeline that included Trump's statements throughout. pretty damning out of his own mouth.
"You were complaining about Trump's efforts to overturn the election, they were complaining about the prices they see on the shelves every day"
so what are they saying now when their Dear Leader is saying that "affordability is a Democratic hoax" when a year ago he was saying he'd fix it all on Day 1?
I have long had a lot of issues with Biden and his policies & his often poor political instincts but i don't recall any ostentatious displays when people were suffering, not even on his birthdays.

Comment Samsung always pisses on Samsung (Score 1) 87

Samsung is collection of several companies and if you've ever spent any time working with them you quickly realize that they all prioritize other Samsung companies below other customers. I don't know whether it's because of anti-trust concerns, or market strategy, or just rivalry, but I've never seen any Samsung company that operated any differently. I worked quite a bit with Samsung Mobile and S.LSI, who are even quite interdependent (though S.LSI depends more on Samsung Mobile than the reverse), and they constantly ignored and even dissed one another.

Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 1) 91

The problem is that it's not intuitive that there's a special case traffic rule for that and I don't remember it ever being brought up in driver's ed

There's no way your driver's ed class failed to mention that traffic is required to stop for school buses with their red lights flashing, and I think it's unlikely that your written test failed to include a question about school zone and school bus rules. Mine (Utah) certainly did.

Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 1) 91

I guess neither humans or bots are trained well on that. It's pretty stupid anyway. The kids should cross the street at normal crossings like everyone else, not just anywhere a huge yellow beast stops and flips out a sign.

In rural areas, like where I live, there aren't any marked crossings, and there really isn't any reasonable place to put them. If you mark a crossing it would only ever be used by the one or two houses near it, and only by school children, because there's really no need for anyone to walk across the street otherwise. The school buses stop directly in front of each child's house. There aren't any locations where a bus could pick up multiple children without making them have to walk an unreasonable distance, so each kid's house is a stop.

Also, the speed limit on my road is 45 mph, and cars routinely drive 55 mph... so having the "huge yellow beast" with flashing red lights and a flipped-out, flashing red stop sign is definitely necessary.

Comment Re:AV1 lacks hardware support compared with H.264 (Score 1) 34

> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

Comment Re:backups (Score 4, Insightful) 48

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."

Comment Re:So it's not the worst thing (Score 1) 160

"During COVID there was a lot of financial support for people"
Trump voters call that socialism.
"During COVID there was a lot of financial support for people. That ended only after Trump left office"
not a SINGLE one of the federal benefit plans for COVID expired before Sept 2021.
some, such as the pause on student loan payments & interest accrual were in place until late 2023
of course Trump was constantly tweeting about how he was the real POTUS but...well, you know.

"So they just don't/didn't remember Trump's first four years as a terrible time in their lives"
that claim can only be supported by ignoring how they felt about lockdowns or, for example, this:
"May 7, 2020
Over 33 million jobless claims have been filed"
https://doggett.house.gov/medi...
Memories are short, especially for those with COVID-induced memory loss

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