I can't speak for DesScorp, but typically if IBM has agreed to a support contract then they will provide support.

I've always believed in using separate components for my home entertainment system to the greatest extent possible, and while not specifically for this particular scenario I still maintain that it makes sense to keep the system modular.

If nothing else, it means that if one part of the modular system becomes obsolete, only that module has to be replaced. And with the heightened pace of obsolescence of cloud-connected personal electronics these days it even makes sense from an e-waste perspective. It's a lot less wasteful to dispose of something the size of a Roku box or a Fire TV stick than to dispose of a whole TV. Plus it means from a security point of view that if one does need to protect one's accounts, even physically destroying the small object is a lot less wasteful or polluting.

Past discussion has stated that basically every large PRC Chinese company operates under a charter that allows the government to basically influence or take over the company at will.

Stop thinking of China as a Communist state. Start thinking of it as one giant company where the Politburo is the board of directors and the Inner Party are shareholders, and all of the people in China vary somewhere between employee and liability.

...need to be brought against both the principal studios and against the subcontractors. They're not supposed to allow this to occur. If their own supply-chains are so poorly documented that this occurs on any sort of large scale then it's reasonable to pursue penalties on even if on simple negligence.

Here's a llama there's a llama,
and another little llama,
Fuzzy llama, Funny llama,
llama, llama, Duck.

My guess is that the rise of the cell phone has helped a bit, it has meant that developers were getting used to writing for lower-powered devices again and not everything was simple bloatware.

I still have sitting on a shelf a first-generation 64 bit AMD laptop running Windows XP Media Center Edition with a beautiful screen and keyboard, that has only 1.5GB RAM because that is all that it supports at the chipset level. I had 1.5GB RAM on a desktop computer first in 1999 or so and that the first 64 bit intel-compatible units couldn't do more than that was an insult, but I needed a new laptop when I bought it and it didn't occur to me that it was going to be a problem only a short time later. Oh well.

If you look at it from an e-waste point of view, it's not a half-bad idea to have minimum standards for the new device in a given market so that it will last a long time before going functionally obsolete and ending up being disposed of.

I've always been a fan of buying as much capability for the soldered-on components as I can. At one point that was just processor and things like the screen (ie don't buy the 800x600 passive-matrix when the 1024x768 active matrix was available) but lately it's transitioned into RAM. Anything under 32GB on a new device is simply not in the cards for me, spending the extra $50 will mean a couple of years of extra service-life out of the laptop. We end up using our devices for the better part of a decade, so to me that actually matters.

This was part of the reason why I stopped even considering Apple several years ago, I had to give up hardware features that I felt were important in order to get other hardware features that I felt were important. Things like an actual physical escape key. And doing away with both USB-A and SD or even MicroSD at the same time was a dealbreaker for the sorts of devices that I use, like digital cameras. You'd have to go back almost fifteen years to find an Apple laptop that has anything close to the combination of features that would have worked.

Sounds like the computer did the audience a favor.

I couldn't tell you exactly what kids use computers for, but I spent 20 years in IT for a K-12, and spreadsheets were not part of the curriculum for K-8 grades. High school students used spreadsheets for proper spreadsheet things (ie, not as a glorified database flat-file) as a primary function only in business-applications classes.

It would be difficult to type a term paper on a device without a keyboard, but we've already seen keyboard dock solutions for other tablet devices including those that don't run Windows or Apple's OSes.

I have to disagree for one very important reason, this device could have potential in the education market specifically because it's not a full-featured computer.

One of the problems with general purpose full-featured computers in the hands of students is the ability to get off-task. The student may have one assignment that they're supposed to do, but that student may have dozens of things that they would like to do for their own entertainment on said device. It requires self-discipline for the student to stay on the required task, and many students simply don't have that discipline.

When the electronic device has only a very limited number of functions then this makes it harder to go off-task due to the nature of the device itself.

And for those who are skeptical, think back to the days of using a simple calculator or even a scientific calculator versus switching to a Texas Instruments graphing calculator. After typing in 5318008 a few times there wasn't a lot of off-task use of the simpler calculators, but for the graphers we had even rudimentary text-based computer games as far back as the mid-nineties.

A color e-ink reader with some basic applet capability that doesn't support side-loading could make for a useful educational tool if textbooks are loaded on it and if it can do basic worksheet editing and submission.

The trouble is there are a lot of truly terrible human drivers on the roads as well, and those terrible drivers' issues driving end up manifesting when traffic is most congested. Sure, there are occasional single-vehicle accidents or accidents between vehicles in uncongested areas from time to time, but it's usually when tensions are highest due to the stress of traffic that bad human driving results in collisions.

What they're going to need to work out is how to handle situations when the 'correct' process isn't possible, and how to determine if a technically-incorrect process would still be safe, and if that would be the way to solve it. Because in-practice we see this sort of thing frequently, things like going around double-parked vehicles by crossing a double-yellow for a short time, or determining when a failed signal means one should proceed after some waiting period, that sort.

I would like to see autonomous driving on highways and freeways where the limited-access nature of the road or long stretches without cross-traffic or pedestrians might make it simply safer and easier on the human operating the vehicle.

To pay a living wage to a cab driver would cost around $75,000 per year accounting for payroll taxes, benefits, and other employer-born costs, if the drivers are employees of the taxi firm rather than true independent contractors that basically rent the cabs and then receive dispatch from the company as part of the cab rental.

If the cab company can do away with the drivers then that's a huge amount of money that they're giving up. That's why they're pushing for autonomous vehicles.

The whole point of reintroducing the Cruise cars with human drivers is to get us used to seeing them operating again, where we're not instantly thinking of them as dangerous road hazards. Likely the intent is to try to shift back towards autonomous driving again, slowly as their developers actually get the software to work properly.

Enterprise IT changes every few years as they lifecycle things. In reality I'm not all that surprised, especially if upper management changed over and the new regime had different perspectives.

We are sitting in this weird spot that business-class desktop machines that are a decade old can still perform adequately to meet the needs of the user short of things like gaming.

I suspect that the biggest issues are in enterprise computing on virtual machine platforms where both CPU density (and associated heat) and GPU density have become core elements.

Industry leaders that are conducting basic research should be developing their own manufacturing equipment to produce chips using those revolutionary processes/scales that are supposed to be a major component of being industry leaders.

That they're buying machines for their flagship products indicates that they're no longer the leaders they used to be. It would be one thing if they ended up buying machines for expanding their legacy products offerings simply because their own in-house machines are worn out or otherwise require lifecycle, or because they've upgraded the oldest products to a new process to make them more cost effective while still producing something that on-paper meets the legacy product specifications, but this doesn't sound like doing that.

And I hate to see this/say this; Intel is a major employer in the metro area that I live in and I've been personally acquainted with people that worked as manufacturing technicians on the factory line, but it sounds like Intel continues to make compounding mistakes in their business. I don't know how a company that has managed to lose nine billion dollars over two years can continue to operate.