Sorry, I can't help
I'm too busy training my AI to launder money, and I'm way behind everyone else.
120 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2007
We had an after hours "contest" to see who could quickly build a trigger mechanism for a remote device. The winner used a pair of RPI's, relays, and handheld police radios jacked from security cruisers in parking lot. It was up and running in 13 minutes (that included 7 minutes {engineers} to jimmy the locks on the cars).
If we were 16 years old this would have taken less than 5 minutes total.
Every Fortune 500 company throws up a smoke screen around their cash cow(s). It's best that the competition not know where the ridiculous margins are to be had.
As far as the investors go, they don't care where the cash comes from, they only care that it continues to flow in. The best way for management to maintain profitability is to obscure its source from those who can take it away.
Agreed, it's actually a very efficient business model. Tech companies are very good at building innovative products that consumers want. They're also very good at slurping data that governments, businesses, miscreants, ... are willing to pay for. Privacy was always an illusion anyway.
You're buying a $30 prepaid android from wally-world or bestbuy. I have an $8 a month prepaid Moto E2 on which I run several apps and an alternate ego that I prefer not to associate with my main line. That's $30 down and $100 per year for a quarantined sandbox to play in. If I Uber'd it would be on line 2.
I like the sports car analogy. MacP is an Alfa Romeo 4c. Beautiful to look at, makes wonderful noises, and tightly rounds the bends; but never seems to have enough power ... and oh yea, it has a boot, you'll need OEM luggage though, because your Gucci duffle won't fit.
Amen to that. My Shuffle 5g exploded. Turns out its hermetically sealed battery bag was assembled at sea level. I live at 5k feet above sea level so the hermit bag expanded and ruptured early on. 14 months after purchase the battery failed while charging and the hermit bag did not confine the nasty bits The inevitable happened.
Apple's response was "it's your fault". It was my fault, I made the mistake of buying an Apple product.
The Gigafactory will be located just outside Reno Nevada.
1) raw material mines and processing facilities are nearby
2) reliable solar and wind renewable energy sources to power the production facilities
3) amiable growth oriented legislative bodies, at the local and the state levels
4) relatively close to the vehicle production facility, yet outside the stifling California tax and regulatory environment.
Security was given a low priority, though it was not Cutler's decision. That was a management decision. Baking in a secure kernel and separate address spaces was strongly recommended by the development team. Ultimately the management rejected it due to the increased cost and time to market.
I agree, this reminds me of the TATA compressed air car. They were claiming ridiculous efficiencies when in fact the full cycle efficiency was in the single digits. Compressed air is a horrible energy storage medium. Pure gas is a little better, but in the end the thermal dynamic losses of the compression/decompression cycle render it useless for energy storage.
They discovered that one of the strippers had spilled a drink on the instrument cluster and some organic material had gotten mixed in from an unspecified reproductive act. They're still scratching their heads trying to explain the cloudy substance on the external mirror. Although the scratching may be due to microorganism left by the goat they were joyriding.
You might think this is price gouging on their part. Probably not. They have a substantial DIY gamer business. Once their HDD inventory is gone the rest of their DIY revenue will also tail off. The hard drive is an essential (yet inexpensive) part of a new build. Doubling or quadrupling the price of a HDD won't kill most builds. Not having any HDD's available from Newegg or any other component supplier probably will.
What Gen. Shelton is freaking out about is the degradation of his high end guidance systems used on military aircraft, autopiloted drones, guided ordinance, ...
LightSpeed's cheap transmitters are splattering all over the GPS frequencies. This significantly decreases the accuracy of GPS carrier phase correction processing. Centimeter accuracy suddenly becomes 10 meters or worse.
That might be ok for a nuke, but won't cut it when he's poking a small FAE into a cave entrance or through your bedroom window.
It's even better that they are talking about redesigning the Pentium core. It hasn't seen a lot of change since they dropped back to the PIII. Most of the silicon changes since have been dedicated to 64 bit, cache expansion, SSE extensions, memory controller, graphics, and visualization. The core is essentially the same.
IA reimplemented specifically for mips/watt would significantly change computing. A near static design where clock speed matches compute needs would kick arse. No mips demand = near zero power consumption. Instant on is irrelevant if always on consumes only a few milliwatts.