"the lifestyle brand known for its bass-heavy headphones"
Are we talking about Skullcandy, or Bose. When I think of bass-heavy headphones, I immediately think Bose.
Now I am considered kind of strange because I use studio headphones as my primary headphones. I just like the proper reproduction of sound. Most people find it jarring as they are used to processed sound. The Bose were almost twice as much at the time, and the sound was completely wrong. Way too bass heavy, which is very typical of most, if not all of the Bose products.

Why would Flock not be a viable company?
Nvidia is doing well. They are known for lying, false marketing, stealing technology from other companies and treating their customers like pure crap.
Impark racks up thousands of verifiable complaints with the Better Business Bureau every month. They are known to be completely evil. Yet more parking lots keep using them to gather tolls for paid parking.
Taser is doing fine. Their guns are supposed to only be used in situations where you would use a gun with a bullet. They have been found multiple times encouraging police to use their guns in situations which the use of them would be illegal.
Honestly there are a lot of companies that operate unethically, illegally and customer antagonistically which are doing quite fine.

Don't get me wrong, I wish karma would catch up with some of these companies, but being bottom feeding, scum sucking, algae eaters does not make a company not viable.

Dave Plummer wrote the GUI for Windows NT 4.0. As Dave explains, using the command line tools, you have been able to make bigger FAT32 partitions this whole time, just not using the GUI. It was supposed to be looked at by a GUI designer after, but never was. It was designed for Windows NT 4.0 only, and he figured it would be revised by people in the future. His biggest removable drive to test with was a whopping 16mb CF. He figure that a cluster size of 32kb was big enough for the foreseeable future of Windows NT 4.0. Only problem, is no UI designer came along and reworked his functional design. No one really revised the code after NT 4.0, because "it worked". The limit on the GUI was artificial, and made sense at the time. He had to choose where to draw the line in the GUI for what cluster sizes to show in a dropdown. The problem is that the UI person did not come along, no one bothered increasing the options. It wasn't so much that it couldn't be done, just no one did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I find most of the time that AI will spit out something close to what you want 1 out of 10 times. Yes, the other 9 times is no where near what you want. What's wrong with having a game where at least 90% of it is pure crap and most of the game mechanics don't work properly? It however can generate a lot of content. You could have a great crafting system. Okay, some swords will just look like boomerangs, and the medieval town will mostly look like a modern city, but hey, if you don't like the slop, there is a lot of different slop just around the corner. One of these realistic looking games will have to appeal to you. After all, who would want anything stylized, or unique? Why would you want something with gravity different from Earth?

Right now the NPU portions of these processors are mostly staying dormant.
I just bought an Arrowlake processor for the future.
Sure they can be used for Chatbots, but where they will really start to shine is in productivity software.

We are starting to see the beginning of things with real time background and better green screen removal.
How about suggestions on what can be cut from your video and transitions to use? What if it learns how you edit and can start making suggestions on how you already work? How about better upscaling, sure. Sure your 1080p video is fine, but what if you want to zoom in on something and have it still look really good?
Some of these things are available with special tools and using your graphics card with multiple steps, but what if this was all available in your favorite video editing package out of the box?

How about photo editing? Again, there are special tools like Photo AI, Gigapixel, Luminar, etc that use your GPU. The Google Pixel smart phones already use the NPU for better object removal. We have smart removal tools, but what if they can now use the NPU to most of the time look perfect with very little work. Being able to have focus that doesn't add artifacts? Noise removal, face recovery. Sure a lot of these things can be done now by brute force on a GPU, but a NPU is designed for this. What if using both you can start doing things in real time, which might take you minutes of wait time and hoping things turn out right. As you tweak you have to wait minutes for each try, instead of seeing it in real time.

I haven't looked much into it, but I understand there are 3 tools that come with Audacity that only work with an NPU. So we are starting to see it help out in audio. Removing background noise, that kind of thing.

I am not going to say everyone needs these things, but I would argue that in the future a large portion of people will start using these features, probably without even thinking about it, just expecting it to be there.

I am mostly using AI for entertainment purposes, which I'm usually using Perchance AI. The text generation is using SDXL, though I think one of the image generators I play with also uses SDXL somehow. Perchance uses Flux AI for its image generation, which can be quite fun. Especially when a leg ends in a hand, or 3 arms, or 0, or 1 leg. I guess it is just being inclusive, right?

My work requires us to use MS Office.
Each new version is getting harder and buggier
I've lost track of the number of times I've had to recover a document with Libreoffice where Word could no longer open it.
I didn't lose any data, I didn't lose any formatting. Libreoffice didn't complain, but Word would not open it.
Excel is just crap now! I spent about 1 hour trying to get SUM to work properly. As far as I can tell, it was treating some numbers as percentages. No matter what I tried I couldn't stop Excel from being "smart". I finally just loaded up Calc, remade the whole document in about 5 minutes. Saved it in Excel format, and it loaded fine in Excel. Yes, I tried remaking the whole document in Excel from scratch, but it still wanted to be "smart" with handling the numbers.

At home I sometimes chain calculated cells onto other calculated cells. Calc has no problem with this. I've had Excel calculate incorrect numbers, give an error, or sometimes crash when I do this.

Canada law has made this very simple, If you "buy a digital copy" or something, you are buying a license for that media. This also applies to CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, etc. You get a license to use that media for personal use. This means that if you buy a DVD, you legally can download a Blu-ray quality version off the Internet legally. You own the license to view it, not limited to format. Things only get a little murky if the HD version has been "transformed" enough. Transformed is where the content has been added to, or rearranged, but the murky part is there is no clear definition of how much has to be added, or changed. Current rulings would suggest 5 to 15 minutes of changes. If the company you bought the digital copy from goes under, you still have a legal license with the content company that currently owns the rights to view said media. There are exceptions to this where you can lose that license if you use it illegally, but other than that, they can't revoke that license, no matter what the license agreement might state.

How do rentals work then?
In Canada, there is a limited license, also called a rental license. It must be clearly stated that the you are renting the media. It must also have a clear statement of how long the rental is for. The word "buy", or "purchase" cannot be used in any part of the process as it can cause confusion of the license being used. Any use of these words changes the limited license into a full license.

Now where Canadian law gets a little ridiculous is in the wording of what constitutes personal use. Personal use is 1 to 2 people. Technically, if you sit down as a family of more than 2 people to watch a movie, or listen to music, that is in violation of the license terms. Obviously this isn't going to be enforced, but I question the state of mind of the lawmakers when they put this in.

Yes, Intel is having troubles with their desktop and server chips, but that only makes up about 40% of their business.
One of their biggest sellers is Pentium CPUs. I believe it was Pentium 3 chips the last I looked.
These are not going into computers, but go into things like touch lamps, smart toasters, or other embedded devices.
They use an old proven chip design, shrunk to the last proven low failure technology.
This is mass production, high sales at low margins approach.
I know that some automation systems also use these for ease of development at a decent price.

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.