HP Printers have always been inferior to almost all other printers. Not sure about now, but Epson, impressively, somehow made worse inkjet printers for a long time. Not only has their print quality and color reproduction been poor, but they have charged an absolute premium for the ink. I personally have a Canan Inkjet, just because I found their printing and color reproduction to be far superior. Though I wouldn't call their ink cheap, I have found third party inks have tended to smudge and not reproduce color as well. I rarely use my inkjet because my Brother laser does really good color prints. Good enough to put in photo frames on the wall. Again, the toner isn't cheap, but it lasts a long time.

The full story is that a navy ship detected what they thought was an implosion event at the same time that that surface vesicle lost contact with the Titan. The ship relayed this back to headquarters where they pulled the information from S.O.S.A.R. confirming it was an implosion event and were able to triangulate it to near the wreckage of the Titanic. There were no assets or threats in the vicinity, so it was marked for follow up.

When the Titan was reported missing, the navy pulled up the report. The time and last known position matched where and when they detected the implosion event, so they immediately contacted the coast guard with the information.

Now you need to understand that US agencies do not trust each other. You also have to understand that their armed forces are a whole bunch of separate agencies. The navy was sure of the implosion event. S.O.S.A.R. is a multi billion dollar sonar network in the Atlantic specifically designed to be able to hear a pin drop and know that it was a pin and exactly where it was, within a few inches.

The coast guard then took that information and decided that was just what the navy thinks. We need to be heros and save these people, because they might be alive. They also did not share this information with any other agencies, or countries. The air force came in with sonar buoys, and other countries deployed navy assets. The US navy did not participate.

We saw this on 9/11 as well in New York. The fire, police and ambulance services do not trust each other. They have completely different communication systems because of this. Police and ambulance services were told to stay out of the building because it might collapse. They could not get a hold of the firefighters to tell them to get out. In the report on what went wrong, the number one thing cited as why so many people died unnecessarily was lack of coordination, mostly due to lack of communication. The main suggesting was an integrated communication system. New York still lack this system to today. Hundred to thousands of people still die each year due to this lack of an integrated system in New York alone. (In Canada we had the same problem with opposition to integrated communications, but leaders here have said this is the way, don't like it, quit)

It is estimated that the Royal Bank of Canada makes about $1 billion in illegal fees every day, or about 700k a second. That's just in illegal fees. I doubt it takes JP Morgan even a second to make that $4 million back. This isn't even a slap on the wrist. This is more like a tap on the shoulder.

I'm not going to argue that their pre-Adrenaline drivers were very good, but I've found the Adrenaline drivers to be quite well written.

Getting 72% improvement in specific situations isn't necessarily an indicate of something written poorly, it can sometimes just be not getting the time to make some insane optimization work right. For instance, I was just working on this piece of code recently and got it working 100% correctly. It was clean, easy to understand and bug free. I was told to make it faster, so I spent a whole bunch of time to make something that isn't very easy to read, took a long time to get bug free, but performs 60% faster. In this case, it was worth spending the extra time and making it harder to maintain. One of our customers still wants it faster. I know of a couple of way that I can make it a little faster, but it will take days to rework and lots of testing to try my best to make sure there are no possible problems.

A lot of the time, you can make something faster, the question is at what cost? When is getting just a little bit faster not worth the time to squeeze out more performance. When does the risk of something not working properly because you can't think of, less test every possible scenario?

I hate Nvidia drivers! They are buggy spaghetti code. Yes, they are fast, but often at the cost of being buggy. Actually some of the biggest problems in the Radeon drivers has nothing to do with bugs in the Radeon drivers, it has to do with things being optimized to be able to work on Nvidia's crap drives. Sometimes in DirectX 11, or before programmers call non-standard Nvidia only calls without checking to make sure they exist first. This has caused AMD to have to add these non-standard calls to their drivers and map them to standard calls, but until they do so, some of the games don't work properly. Fortunately Vulkan and DirectX 12 have done away with a lot of this.

As for getting Minecraft up to 79% faster, I'm sure with how popular Minecraft has been for quite some time, that they specifically worked on some optimizations with that game in mind. Minecraft isn't exactly the most efficient game. I'm sure getting this extra performance probably took a lot of time and resources, but if something is very popular, sometime it is worth it to try to squeeze out as much performance as possible, or maybe someone saw an optimization that would give a lot of that performance, but it would take months to get it working just right.

Not that I have done all that much 3D programming, but in what I have done, the Adrenaline drivers are a breath of fresh air, and the Nvidia drivers have been my worst nightmare. Actually if it weren't for the nightmare of the Nvidia drivers I probably would be playing around with more 3D programming.

Qualcomm bought Nuvia. That means that Qualcomm now has legal rights to every thing Nuvia. The only reason I can think of for Softbank Group to do this is to try to force a buy out of ARM. They were desperate to sell off ARM before, then Nvidia was going to buy them, but they were blocked by multiple governments. I don't think there is anyway for them to win this fight, but they could draw it out long enough to make it expensive for Qualcomm. The only reason to do this would be to try to force Qualcomm to buy them out, trying to push for sooner rather than later.

You might want to look a little more into The Gates Foundation before you start thinking that Bill Gates has a conscience at all. You really don't have to dig very deep to understand that The Gates Foundation is just Bill's form of power to try to control the world.

Yay, he's pouring money into something he controls, some of which gets funneled back into his own bank account.

They are cleaning up water in places. In some of those places they polluted the water by making factories.

They are controlling the population in Africa, by offering money to young men in exchange for getting vasectomies. These young men are desperate to feed themselves and their parents, not really understanding, or able to care about the future. Now some of them have good jobs and want to start a family, but cannot because of a decision made out of desperation.

Even their vaccination efforts have come under some scrutiny. It turns out The Gates Foundation will only buy vaccines made at a specific set of plants. Oddly enough, Bill Gates owns shares in the company that runs those plants.

They have deals made with schools in the US to provide computers and Microsoft software for the first 6 years of the deal, if the schools pay for the last 4 years of the deal. The deals specifically structured that about 80% of the costs come in the last 4 years, mostly paid to Microsoft, which oddly, as a owner, partially ends up back in Bill's personal pockets.

Quite a few other people are mentioning Common Core, which is Bill's play to shape the education system in the US and around the world to his whim.

This isn't conscience, this is egotism! He is promising to give his fortune away again, but we've heard this before. He promised most of his money would already be in the foundation. He was actually called out a number of years ago by some of the other contributers to the foundation because for a long time he was only contributing what he could make a full tax write off on. Bill ended up contributing I think $4b to try to make them happy, but as far as we can tell, started to go back to only what he could write off in taxes after that.

Lets not forget that his wife didn't just leave him for his indiscretions in the past, these were thing happening in the months leading up the divorce. It was mentioned affairs at Microsoft and the Foundation in the divorce.

Many people were saying that with all the bad things Bill has done, there is no way anyone could see him in a positive light again after the divorce. Apparently all it took was $20 billion.

Yes, the nVidia drivers were as much an issue as the press said, and are still a hot mess of buggy code. (When Vista came out it was nVidia, instead of now Nvidia)
Note, I said nVidia drivers. If you were using ATI/AMD, or Intel graphics, you were fine.
Yes, I said still are a buggy mess. For a while with gaming it was get the game working using the standard Direct X call, then get it working on Nvidia.
Now, since so many people have the cards, it is get it working and running well on Nvidia, and then have it fall back to standard calls for all the other cards and just get it working on them.
Unfortunately, it isn't only the Nvidia drivers that are buggy, but their hardware also has serious design flaws, which their drivers do try to work around. I don't know about the 3xxx series, but I know every card up to and including the 2xxx series had at least 1 major design flaw, with a whole bunch of minor flaws as well.

Right, we were talking about Vista. I think the biggest problem Vista had was it was still in Alpha when it was released. Many of the features were not finished on release. I was on the external Beta testing team, and we were telling them that the OS wasn't anywhere near stable enough to use for daily work. Some features got finished for Windows 7, but never patched into Vista. Many features were just dropped all together. I think many of the problems with Vista were features were in the OS, but they were in an unfinished state.

I bought Windows Vista Ultimate because of all the promised things they were going to give us. They never delivered, even though they were advertised on the box that if you bought Ultimate, you would be getting these features later.
The feature I was most looking forward to was WinFS. It had been cancelled as a separate projected by the time Vista was released, but was promised to be integrated right into the OS.

Ultimately, Windows Vista was just extremely buggy, even with the right hardware. 4GB or RAM and it was solid? If you wanted to be running 1-3 basic programs at the same time. No, you really needed 8GB and running the 64-bit version to make it kind of work okay. The 32-bit build was extremely unstable. I fortunately had 8GB or RAM, and was able to run 64-bit, but every time I had to install Vista, to re-install my upgrade to Windows 7, I was quickly reminded of how bad Vista was, even fully patched.

To be fair, a hairdresser did create Starlight.
What is Starlight? It is a revolutionary new plastic which can resist large amounts of heat.
The inventor of it created it when he kept hearing about fires on planes causing them to crash.
He set out to make a fire resistant material that was light enough to be used on airplanes. He ended up with a material that at 1mm thick can outperform the ablative plates on space craft.
So where is this fancy new plastic? Lost in time unfortunately. Only the creator knew how to make it and he died trying to make sure everyone would have it.
NASA and Bowing both tested the material and found it performed better than what the claims were, but they wanted to own the patent and not share it with anyone. The creator wanted to license it and hoped that in getting less money than selling it to one company, that all the world could benefit from it.
Those with samples have been trying to reverse engineer the stuff, but unfortunately due to company greed, the world is not safer.

Windows CE 6 - September 2006
Windows Phone 7 - October 21, 2010
Windows Phone 7.5 - 2011
Windows Phone 8 - October 29, 2012
Windows Mobile 10 - January 21, 2015

There were other releases, but I just put of the version of Windows people started really writing apps for and then were supposed to rewrite them from scratch.
Sometimes an app would kind of work on the next version of the OS. Most of the time you could not update your phone OS.
Microsoft said with 7 that they were creating the future of the API that would be supported for a long time. In 7.5 they said that the API was drastically changing and you should code for the 8 API, that is now supported. 8 came out and the API had changed, so nothing for 7.5 would really work without a rewrite.
Then 10 introduced a completely different API.

Basically, Microsoft was asking developers to rewrite their apps from scratch every 1 to 2 years. Some apps take 1 to 2 years to write in the first place, so it isn't a surprise that most developers just gave up.
The biggest problem with Windows Phone was a lack of 3rd party apps. There weren't the apps, so people didn't want them, so device manufacturers didn't want to use the OS, making less people want them.

Best Buy handed Amazon all its business on a silver platter.
As mentioned by others, they have very little computer parts, outside of the common mass used stuff.
What really started to push me towards Amazon was them removing CDs, then DVD/Blu-rays.
(Yes, I know they sell DVD and Blu-rays again)
I used to go there to buy more than 1 thing at a time. They changed it so that there was usually only 1 thing to buy, and it was just easier to get it on Amazon. Also, with how they started jacking up the prices, it also made it cheaper.
Then there was what they did with Futureshop in Canada.
Best Buy bought out Futureshop. Originally they were going to phase out the Futureshop name and replace it with Best Buy, but they found out that Futureshop sold higher end products, so they ran with both brands. Then it started to become too expensive to run two stores with different items. They decided to close down Futureshop.
I don't have any qualm with them shutting down Futureshop, I have a qualm with the scum bag way they did it!
On the last day of operation, Best Buy sent all the managers a package with Futureshop is now closed signs. There were instructions that only the manager should open it, and it should be done after the store has closed and all other employees had left. When they opened the package it told them to post the signs and not inform the employees that they were out of jobs. Employees found out about the closure when they tried coming to work the next day and the signs were up and they were locked out of the stores. Best Buy publicly said days later that Futureshop employees could apply for jobs at Best Buy if their store reopened as a Best Buy.
Shut down the stores, sure.
Lay off people, sure.
Lay off people without telling them, slimy and disgusting.
Force people to reapply if the store is just changing its name, scum bag move.

Now you have this.
Laying off people, sure.
Hiring part time workers to replace the full time, scum bags!
Honestly, they are doing this to underpay people, and only wanting part time workers, so they don't have the extra expense of benefits.
It takes some real slime balls running a company to be as scummy and bottom feeding as the poor excuses for human beings that run Best Buy!

I have only "shopped" there once since the whole Futureshop fiasco, and that is just because I was given gift cards for the place.

Musk has said that initial trips are only planned to be one way. That doesn't mean you will get stuck on Mars, just plan to be there for years.
If things work our well, he thinks it could be as little as 10 year for people to be able to start returning from Mars, though also admitted that more realistically you are looking at more around the 15 year mark. Supplies will be sent up to help out, but they are hoping to get underground living quarters going that are self sustaining ASAP. The fuel refineries are mostly for providing power and heat to the Mars colony. Though I think they plan on sending the crew and resupply capsules sooner.

First Google removed the "Don't be evil" from their code of conduct.
Now they've basically added "We are evil, DEAL WITH IT!"

Under oath in court he said that the FCC has no ability to regulate the Internet, then later says why they are regulating the Internet in the way they are. He blatantly, and purposely lied in court!
The truth is that the Internet is a form of communications, so by definition it falls under the FCC to be able to regulate it, but either way Pai lied in court.
Then it was found out that he purposely lied to congress. Which with how he lied is supposed to be 6 to 20 years behind bars.
Again, how is this proven criminal not in jail already?

People are comparing this to LIDAR. While it is similar, this is not LIDAR.
LIDAR actually captures a 3D image from its perspective.
This sounds like it captures where objects are and their orientation.
This Time Measurement system has an advantage where you can look at the picture from any angle and you will see any object that was in the original "picture" in full detail from that perspective.
With LIDAR the image quickly starts to fall apart if you are only imaging from 1 camera.
Even imaging from 2 angles with LIDAR will only get so much detail.
The problem with Time Measurement is that you basically have to have some 3D representation of every object in the scene.
They talk about needing thousands of images of each subject from different angles.
I'm sure an alternative would be a 3D model of every object.
If you think about it, it is more a form of motion capture than a picture.
It just incorporates rendering as part of the process.

It is very simple. Microsoft got rid of most of their QA. They rely on their fast tier customers to find the bugs, then they ignore their bug reports. They also rely heavily on their code AI tools to find bugs.