While I agree with your general point about the hype around all of this stuff, and using memory in a somewhat misleading way, but neurons do exhibit local "memory" that is key to the overall function.

For example, synapse strength is maintained by neuron dna histone modification. Anther interesting example is the purkinje cell (controls motor neurons) that has been shown to "learn" firing sequences (timing and strength) in isolation (not connected to other cells).

A cell is a very complex machine, it's like our biological unit of computation is not really similar to a transistor, it closer to an entire computer.

Sharks, my name is raftpeople and and I'm looking for $300,000 for a 5% stake in "Mobile-Can".

No, this isn't a mobile app promoting positive thinking, it's a ground-breaking new idea that solves a critical problem in today's gig-economy - going to the bathroom in a car.

This is our product, a stylish receptacle with an adjustable opening that's both functional and beautiful.

Yes we have both utility patents and design patents, and we also generate ongoing revenue with the sales of replaceable filters. I'm handing out samples so each of you can try it out on live TV.

So Sharks, whose ready to dump your assets into this ground breaking container?

or: "No need to kill, covid got 'em"

I do like the sound of that, but your description did get me thinking: if the stuff that you normally buy is close, and the stuff you don't normally buy is far, does that mean the people living next to the far store have the exact opposite list of normally buy vs not normally buy?

And if you add a few more people in various locations, doesn't that start to get pretty complicated? :)

How about using entanglement? You can't can't send info faster than the speed of light, but seems like this would reach the speed of light in a vacuum, which would be faster than light through air or glass.

is doing more to create chaos in the US than the Russians ever could, Putin is having a good laugh.

"Dave, are you talking? You're probably on mute if you are..."

"Yeah. Um, I'm going to have to go ahead and sort of disagree with you there." - it's legos.

If Gates did say the 640k thing, I suspect it had much more to do with a sales/marketing type statement rather than a technical analysis. The heads of most companies are always saying how great their product is and there are no weaknesses, it's not really something to take seriously (if he did say it).

I was a teenager in the 1970's and I was able to utilize computer time (on a trs 80) to learn programming and create video games (sold commercially), it wasn't uncommon, I also had friends doing the same.

Back to Bill Gates: he's clearly a smart guy and a driven guy and very capable technically. Probably his biggest strength compared to other technical people was his business abilities. He spotted opportunities and then took risks that paid off. He made the right moves (some above board, some not) to lock up markets and became very rich because of that talent.

The two immediately obvious ways of identifying past proximity are:
1 - An absolute location reference history that can be checked
2 - A relative nearness reference history that can be checked

Other than absolute and relative, there aren't to many more options, thus obvious. If you can think of a third I will virtually eat this post.

When referring to processor architectures, x86 is the industry standard term.

Regarding the mainframe: The power is not necessarily due to individual cores, it's really due to the low level design and hardware (cpu plus supporting chips) that supports multiple parallel processing cores/processors/drawers of processors/etc. In addition, there is a large focus on io because for transaction processing workloads io tends to be the bottleneck (that's why IBM puts in much larger but slower caches on their chips).

These systems scale more efficiently than x86 because IBM spent the extra time and money to specifically build in that capability, primarily because they have to. Intel and AMD don't need to because they can gobble up the 99% of the market that doesn't require that level of scaling in a single tightly coupled system (i.e. shared memory etc.) it doesn't make sense for them to chase that niche market.

...has four top level parts. - Oh yeah? Well ours has eleven

I read some articles about Walmart's "cashierless" system, it's a combination of the following:
1 - Renaming cashier's to "hosts"
2 - "Hosts" meet consumer at entrance to self-checkout and either direct them to an open one so they can self checkout, or the "host" will do the actual checkout process for them.
3 - Also, there are employees that can scan your items while you are out in the aisles

I was assuming the "cashierless" meant it was a competing system to Amazon Go and I was surprised Walmart was able to develop it so quickly, looks like they didn't actually develop anything.

Convert Linux to Rust and get...Lust