If I searched my posting history, I'm sure I could find a /. post saying exactly the same thing... except mine would have been from around 2005, and would have mentioned native games instead of Lutris/Steam, and specified Debian Linux and KDE. And GIMP. I was really into photography back then and used the hell out of GIMP. I still use it regularly, though not as much because my camera doesn't get so much use.

My point? I don't really have one, except that these sorts of predictions have a long history of proving to be wrong. Hence the forever meme "Next year is the year of desktop Linux!".

That said, I dumped Windows in early 2002 and I've never looked back and never regretted it, so Linux is and has been a completely viable platform for a long time.

Google pays the foreigners the same as it pays Americans. Maybe a little bit more, if you count the free immigration attorney work.

If just anyone could be trained up, that might make sense, but there's a big element of native talent and intelligence needed, and the US only has about 4% of the world's population. It makes a lot of business sense to look into the other 96% to see what you can find there. And its the moral thing to do, too. Kids in the US are already massively advantaged by their lucky break of being born here. Why not give others a chance?

Google actually does that except they start a little bit later, with college freshmen and sophomores.

Google pays its H1-B workers the same as US citizens, or green card holders, etc. There's no cost savings to be had there.

Wait, what?

If the operator of the windmills and the peaker plants are competitors, why would the windmill operator give up revenue to benefit the peaker plants?

If they're not competitors (e.g. in the same company), shutting down cheap power generation in favor of more expensive power generation would decrease profit, not maximize it.

I can't think of any reasonable structure in which your theory could work. What am I missing?

I should mention that although I'm an Android engineer, I don't have any significant contact with RISC-V work. The above is my interpretation of the public comments, in light of what I do know about the state of RISC-V and the way the Android ecosystem is structured and works.

It's because RISC-V is currently fragmented. Not the base ISA, but the base ISA isn't enough to build a device, and there are a lot of divergent extensions.

That wasn't a problem when RISC-V was only theoretical, but now that companies are working towards actual devices, having the "common" RISC-V support in the Android Common Kernel was a hindrance, not a help. The expectation is that over the course of a few years the RISC-V Android ecosystem will coalesce and settle on a common set of extensions to the ISA and it will then be possible to standardize the RISC-V support in ACK. Until then, it's better if ACK doesn't have any RISC-V support so chip vendors and OEMs can straightforwardly patch in what they need.

That doesn't make sense.

Android devices in China are not Google Play devices (can't be, really, thanks to the Great Firewall), so the device makers are not obligated to use the Android Common Kernel -- or anything else. They're free to take the open source and build whatever they like. Removing RISC-V support from ACK does exactly nothing to hinder their ability to build and deploy RISC-V devices. If they want to stick with Google's kernel for whatever reason, they can simply reapply the patches that were removed. If they want something else, they can do that.

Yeah, it probably will go that way, but it'll take longer than it should because PV is operating at a significant disadvantage due to coal plants free-riding on the environment. In the language of economists, pollution -- including CO2 -- is an externaity, a cost that is borne by a third party not part of the economic transaction. In this case, the parties in the transaction are the power plant operator and whoever buys their power, and the external third party is everyone else who has to cover the healthcare and climate impact costs of that transaction.

The EPA can't do it, but we really should implement a carbon tax to "internalize" (again, the economic term) the CO2 emission externality, so that whoever is emitting the CO2 has to include that cost in their operations, and of course pass it on to whoever buys it. With a carbon tax, the estimated future cost of climate change would be priced into every carbon-emitting process, creating a level playing field against carbon-reduced or carbon-free processes.

Without that, coal has an enormous built-in advantage. I expect that renewables will eventually win anyway, but it's going to take longer and create greater climate-change impact than necessary.

Ideally, we should also internalize other externalities, such as particulate pollution which increases healthcare costs. Make sure everyone is paying the full and accurate cost of their actions, then let the market optimize the outcome. But, one thing at a time.

More seriously, I wonder what sort of protocol they're using. I guess they could just use standard protocols, but with a freaking huge ACK window, but it seems more likely they'd use extensive FEC to reduce effective bit errors to extremely low rates, since NAKing and retransmitting corrupted packets would be incredibly slow. Or maybe that's okay. As long as they're only transmitting stored data which can be retransmitted a half hour later if needed, it might be fine to use simple error detection with retries. Dunno. This would be a fascinating problem to solve.

This ain't gonna work for FPS games... ping times of 25 minutes!

The increase I'm talking about is just in deployed capacity... it's a manufacturing and installation problem, not a technology problem, and it's manufacturing and installation (as well as demand) that is doubling deployed capacity every year, not technological changes. If you want to claim that the current rate of growth is going to stop it's incumbent on you to explain why it will change.

That said, I think you're wrong that the technology is "done". There is lots of very interesting research going on, in both new chemistries and in new manufacturing techniques.

Sure. So? 10 years is almost certainly not enough to get us to that capacity, but 20 years is. Like most such things, installed battery capacity is likely following a sigmoid curve, and we're in the exponential phase, with an exponent of around 2. Assuming we didn't level off, 20 years would see global installed capacity increase about 1,000,000X.

What was the Powerwall price in 2015?