Yep. Market saturation.

That, and my 6 year old tablet is still good enough for most everything I use it for & there's no way in Hades I'd pay more than $200 for a newer model with better specs. (mostly because today's specs aren't much better, yet the prices are higher than a decent laptop).

Ah, for want of Mod points! This. So much this.

802.11a came first, so let's call it WiFi 1
802.11b came next, so let's refer to it as Wifi 2

a and b were NOT compatible -- used different frequencies and hardware. There was a time when you could get one or the other and there were pros and cons to both.

802.11g was next, so Wifi 3 -- was mostly compatible with b, but not a... and if you truly wanted g speeds without issues, you'd tell the wifi access point to NOT allow b to work on it because otherwise, whenever a b device connected, everything dropped to b speeds.

802.11n, 802.11ac, etc.. these are all just IEEE spec names and were never supposed to be consumer friendly. It's fine that they're making a clearer naming scheme for marketing purposes to ordinary consumers, but... it's just not true that all newer versions of Wifi are backward compatible with older ones... and there are even wifi specs for things that were designed around the same time period for different purposes that were never meant to be compatible.... like wireless connectivity between buildings that works on a diff spec and frequency than your general access points indoors.

I've been reading about this daytime cooling through infra-red emissivity to space stuff for a while now. The biggest benefit isn't the color (or the reflective value), but that it will absorb heat from whatever the source and radiate that energy away in the mid-IR band that will allow it to leave Earth's atmosphere without being re-absorbed by anything nearby. That makes it effectively a way to remove heat from the surface of the earth by emitting that energy into space.... heat that would otherwise be trapped by our atmosphere's greenhouse effect.

This is the first time I've seen this expressed as a coating for everyday consumer items rather than as a heat sink layer added to an exterior A/C unit or a potential roofing material, though.

My understanding is that generally these coatings are white in the visible spectrum to reflect sunlight, but emit light in the mid-IR range. There's a startup company for using this to improve efficiency in A/C units I read a while back, and they tested the material in the hot sun on a roof in India -- you could put your hand on it after it had been baking in the sun, and it was cool to the touch. That's relative term, though. I don't recall the actual temperature readings.

I respectfully disagree. Also, word to the wise, don't ever say that to an IT department during an interview. Counties and banks keep hardware 50 years old and maintain OSes that are decades old -- and many run on COBOL and various ancient, long-dead languages. Then, there's the product designers -- like boat hull manufacturers which use CAD-based systems that are easily 15 to 20 years old running on OSes almost just as old.

You want the latest and greatest libraries and functionality -- great. Good for you. Most organizations want to buy something and keep it 'til the wheels come off. Even with regular rotations for equipment, the old 5 year life cycle has turned into a 7 to 10 year one in most counties.

My photographer friends use Adobe Lightroom mostly, but some use Adobe CS 6 and will stay with it until their machine dies and it's impossible to re-install and activate the product. Most of them use Windows 7 and will gladly disconnect the Win 7 box from the network and transfer files by hand to keep it going without having to update to Windows 10 -- ever.

If you're selling a subscription model software, then one should poll the base to see whether or not it's worth supporting their respective OSes. If they've done that and have decided to nuke support for older OSes, then they should just stop offering the subscription license for the unsupported OSes. Let them get a notice -- hey, upgrade your box or your license will de-activate and we'll stop billing you.

That way, there's no half-hearted attempt at keeping the customer happy by allowing them to use unsupported software for a fee.

Love to see the sources for that, because it'd be amazing if true. Best I can find on nanoimprint lithography from the wiki is 10nm -- and that's with overlays. Toshiba got 22 nm and smaller, but no specs on how small.

Intel is having trouble with 7 nm because it's using 4 masks to get there. So, it's really using older tech with many steps to etch smaller w/ these overlays. If you have to run the silicon through the light 4 times in different positions using different patterns, you can get horrible yields as the slightest deviation will either ruin chips or severely impact their performance.

Roadmaps don't impress me as they can and do get pushed back as issues arise. I haven't seen anything credible beyond 5 nm -- and that wasn't even using silicon as the substrate.

that's not to say self-assembling structures and nanotubes won't save the day, but... standard lithography with standard silicon is almost done. No one denies that 5nm is going to be extremely difficult without different materials or exotic methods.

Possible, but I doubt it. Intel may not be able to figure out how to get 7 nm to work for years. TSMC is the obvious choice for AMD to remain in the lead for CPUs and their only hope for parity on GPUs. TSMC may make them pay more for the best quality silicon and fastest capacity, but it'd be worth it.

The only prayer for them to survive was to have such a vast membership that they could mine them for data to sell and/or control the flow of people to movie theaters in such a way that they became the middle-men that theaters would have to partner with and give discounts towards.

They knew they were going to burn through a LOT of cash before that scenario could happen, but they didn't have deep enough pockets to actually make it happen. They came close at one point.

Not only was the business model so shady that everyone took notice, the CEO kept giving rosy best-case scenarios for profitability that made no sense because they didn't take into account some very basic business principles like adverse selection.

Actually, if prices remained fairly stable, it would be a currency.

That's what it was designed to be. These booms and busts are what prevent it from being taken seriously by all the major players in the financial sector.

As others have stated, it doesn't technically require a user to choose to run something. A simple web page with javascript can do it without even prompting you.

Still, Meltdown was the worst because it actually ran code that didn't have the user rights to run. AMD checked permissions before running anything; Intel ran everything and checked AFTER -- leaving data in the cache for other processes to find that it shouldn't have.

But, the fixes for Meltdown and various Spectre variants should also make it much more difficult for other issues to be exploited -- because a lot of the newer exploits require multiple steps and some intuition about what is useful info.

With Meltdown, a web page could have asked for login/password info or other sensitive data that might have prompted a remote exploit, a phishing attack, or just a general attack on various web sites you frequent to try to gain access to them using your info. Now, it's more akin to learning that part of your OS is on a certain sector of your hard drive... kinda useless info unless you have another tool to do something with that information.

nope. Meltdown was an Intel exclusive. Both AMD and Intel run speculative code, but the difference is AMD checked privileges before running speculative code. Intel checked AFTER running it -- meaning unauthorized code could be run before being cleared. That means AMD took a performance hit, but Intel had all kinds of info left in the cache that shouldn't be there so other processes could snoop on things that they shouldn't have privileges to access -- possibly passwords, memory locations, file locations, output for programs that should not have had authorization to run, etc.

Intel's work-around was to clear the cache whenever switching between code of different privileges. That's right -- they dump the cache memory every time a program accesses something of a higher security level so that there's nothing there for a rogue program to access something that's not on its same security level. Side effect being that an empty cache has to be refilled to properly speed up the CPU operations. Things that don't switch much aren't affected much, but some things are severely impacted.

Intel intends to fix this in a few years by changing the silicon to check FIRST -- like AMD does. It takes 2-3 years to design a new processor, though... and I doubt they'll get it in the 2019 silicon. Supposedly, they'll have a quick fix for 2019 silicon and a proper fix for 2020/2021, but who knows. They have been suffering from manufacturing delays b/c they're trying to squeeze the most the can out of outdated lithography and are getting high defects. My bet is the fixes will come when they jump to 7 nm.

This wasn't a new chip -- it was a rebranded server chip overclocked to 5 Ghz using external -10 C (14 F) temp cooling system and a modified motherboard that could use non-ECC memory.

No one would seriously purchase that abomination. It was meant as a distraction and a bit of marketing to compete with AMD's upcoming 32 core Threadripper 2 that was announced shortly after. It was literally a "hey, we got something that can compete with that!" pony show where no one talked about the cooling system needed to overclock it that high -- or even that it was overclocked. Inexperienced reporters ran with a headline that this was a new desktop CPU we might be seeing in the near future. Nope.

They are already now fessing up that if this thing sees daylight, it won't be stock clocked to 5 Ghz -- you'd be lucky to see it at 3.7 Ghz with boost to 4.2 Ghz on some cores. It's literally nothing new and worse than AMD's threadripper model with more cores and made with a better manufacturing process.

It's beyond BS when you take a chip already in use in servers, cherry pick one that has the best (almost miracle perfect) overclock capability and use what was basically a refrigerator to cool the water cooling system and hype it as a DEMO for some upcoming product. Tis vaporware to compete on paper with a soon-to-be shipping AMD product.

There is a possibility that the red giant sun might not go out farther than Venus's orbit, thus merely turning Earth into a molten wasteland on the side tidally locked with the sun. There's also the possibility that even if the red giant sun's size extends to Earth's orbit, Earth may have moved to a more distant orbit from the loss of the sun's mass through fusion and solar wind.... but, again -- molten wasteland on tidally locked side.... at least until the sun becomes a white dwarf star.

Here's hoping we'll have moved to Mars long before then as Earth will be a dry wasteland long before Sol goes red giant.

Could you elaborate? I'm not sure how preventing ISPs from omitting services from their data caps or treating services differently otherwise through throttling or QoS methods has anything to do with what you mentioned.

Netflix isn't an ISP, it's a service. T-mobile isn't an ISP, it's a cellular network and is exempt from these rules as it's "different." DirectTV isn't an ISP, it's a satellite TV / psuedo ISP that plays by different rules as well as far as I can tell. This should only affect landline phone, cable, and fiber customers. (ATT Uverse, Comcast, Charter, Google Fiber, etc)

All it should mean is if say... Comcast has a data cap for service tiers, they can't exempt their own programming or Hulu from that cap but include Netflix or others in data for that cap. They also can't throttle Netflix.

Am I missing something?

It's a brilliant business strategy. They basically control the natural diamond supply, and the best way to continue to artificially prop up their value is by ensuring everyone perceives artificial diamonds as an inferior product. One way to do that is through pricing.

We all know that lab made diamonds can be pretty much identical to mined diamonds. Different defects creep into both, but the lab ones usually have fewer defects.

By De Beers claiming all lab-grown diamonds are the same and not worth grading, they're marketing how each of their mined diamonds are unique and special. By selling the lab ones for a tenth the cost of a mined one, they're not only crushing the competition that sells them for 5 times as much, but marketing that these are inferior and too cheap to be a replacement for a true mined diamond for an engagement ring, etc.

Of course, the marketing is all hot garbage, but... so is the idea that diamonds are rare valuable stones to begin with. De Beers is king of manipulation here. If De Beers is selling these lab ones at near cost, the lab market might crash and burn from lack of profit leaving De Beers as the only lab grown seller as well.

moissanite is the mineral form of silicon carbide they listed