That presumably helped getting (relatively NDA free, no less!) access to the part. Again, I have no idea what Intel says if you want to buy less than a tray worth of anything (much less get detailed assistance/permission, they certainly weren't shy about squishing Nvidia on QPI chipsets...); but the position on the rPI is that (while it is sincerely cheap, and the vendor has no obvious conflicts of interest in selling as many of the things as they can, as uncrippled as they can), it barely matters whether the Gerbers are open or not when the core SoC is practically a special favor from Broadcom.
Intel's availability situation is clearly better for socketed parts (since, even if they won't talk in units of less than a thousand, resellers abound who do whatever they want); but I don't know what the story is for things like chipsets and BGA parts. My personal interest is less in the freedom of the board (since the economics of DIY vs. some pacific-rim slave factory will always be dubious); but the firmware. Intel have, in contrast to their generally good position on graphics, been kind of dicks compared to AMD in terms of Coreboot vs. UEFI+whatever proprietary features Intel has dreamed up these days. An Intel-supported, enough-UEFI-to-actually-be-useful, board would be real news(yeah, Intel has 'Tianocore', which is the OSS implementation of all the boring parts of UEFI; but the good shit, of the sort actually required to do a coreboot port or a fully-open UEFI build, has been lacking for all but the most antique of their gear).
I don't know if Intel would be any different; but my understanding is that the 'openness' complaints about the Pi have something to do with the fact that BCM usually won't even spit on you without an NDA and an order for a zillion trays of parts, so it's nigh-impossible to recreate the system without either a massive minimum order quantity or a special relationship with them.
As you say, production costs, for things like multilayer boards, tend to make having the PCB layout files less practically relevant to most; but you can at least buy small quantity PCB fabrication, though it'll cost you.
But oddly stupid since Intel have open drivers for their own GPUs
It's an ugly story. In their quest to hit lower TDPs a few years back, Intel puked out a bunch of Atoms that are based on SGX540(maybe 545, I forget, doesn't matter from a driver standpoint) GPUs licensed from PowerVR. The 'GMA500', 'GMA600', 'GMA3600', and 'GMA3650' are all of this cursed race. Any of the other GMAs are Intel GPUs, which do indeed have decent drivers.
I have no idea why they went with the horribly shit Atoms for their 'open' board; but they did.
The one thing that might prove interesting is that it is allegedly fullly open (aside from the PowerVR GPU drivers) which (assuming Intel isn't lying or using "'Open' as in a block of magic numbers" definitions, this board, although based on UEFI, might actually be the first Intel product in quite a while to be well documented enough to be a Coreboot/LinuxBIOS target. Even better, it might provide insight into some other products using the same chipsets.
Why is this thing priced like a modern board when it has all out of date components on it? Wake me up when they do the Bay Trail version or slash $100 off of the asking price.
The GMA600 is a real shit sandwich (Oh, sure, I really really want to fuck around with a PowerVR SGX545 and it's utterly shit proprietary driver on my 'open' dev board); but $200 is a steal by the standards of x86 boards designed for embedded purposes (I suspect that there are a bunch of PC/104-format users looking enviously at this board right now, and wondering why Intel didn't answer their prayers instead).
Now, given the prices of Intel's own faster, better, comes-with-case, consumer offerings (their 'Next Unit of Computing' boxes being a good example), this is a poor consumer offering; but it's pretty damn cheap by the standards of similar products.
I suspect that there's at least one other variable: There is a large universe of things that the techies say are safe and doable, if done according to their advice. However, by the time the plan actually gets executed, it is fairly common to discover that... certain liberties were taken... (in fairness to the techies, often against their advice) in some of the expensive-and-boring-safety-features parts of the plan. This leads to a rather smaller universe of things that techies say are safe and doable and which are implemented safely in practice.
Anybody who actually thinks that techies don't know stuff about the world, and science is, like, a social construct, man! is probably a fool.
Anyone who is strongly suspicious that, while the techies do indeed have the knowing and the doing of many things, they may not have the good of the locals at heart (never mind the bean counters and suits at HQ), is just a reasonable student of history.
A pure irrational fear of technology is one thing. The agreement that, yes, technology is powerful; but proposals involving the deployment of power are... not history's most glorious chapter... is much harder to argue with.
Nuclear plants are rather trickier than some industries to redevelop (the fuel casks are stuck in regulatory limbo, the rest of the plant is just a massive structure, much of it radioactive enough to reduce the otherwise significant scrap value and require special procedures, built durable enough that it'll be expensive to demolish) which increases the odds that Maine Yankee HQ will do their best to classify the site as some sort of minimally-operational status in perpetuity, because hiring a couple of guards to wander around and punch the clock is cheaper than fully pulling out, leaving the town with a big derelict structure.
They are hardly alone in that, though. All kinds of industrial processes (especially anything inherited from the good old days when Men Were Men, Cigarettes were a health food, and PCBs were a Miracle of Science), even if their buildings are cheaper to tear down, leave the underlying site in lousy enough shape that it's usually cheaper just to say 'eh, fuck 'em' and choose a greenfield location somewhere else. Even something as minor as a gas station can be Wacky Remediation Fun Time if their storage tank leaked before they went under or moved.
(The only other aspect, though the article is polite, or feckless, enough to ignore it, is that nuclear plants operate under an NRC license, which is of limited duration unless renewed, which requires a variety of testing steps, so their demise is probably rather more predictable than the usual '$FOOCORP moves to China to save 10 cents per widget' story. If your town is basically fucked without its resident nuclear reactor, you really want your town leadership to be well informed(or doing their best to batter down the doors and demand to be made aware) of exactly where in the lifecycle the reactor is, whether HQ is looking for a renewal, whether there are issues that would scuttle that, etc. Predicting a 'Haha, Outsourcing Surprise!' event is relatively challenging. Predicting whether or not a reactor will get recertified or mothballed may not be trivial; but it's a much better defined problem. My guess is that there's a really ugly backstory there. Either the town ignoring the problem to bask in the present, the operator stonewalling/flimflamming the town until it was time to give them the shaft, some of both, some other flavor I'm not thinking of; but that would be the one major wrinkle distinguishing a reactor from any other 'industrial site not easy to remediate'.)
It sounds like the (sadly not atypical) story of what happens to a company town when the company leaves, more or less regardless of the flavor of company.
The fact that a bunch of nuclear waste casks prevent any redevelopment of that part of the site certainly doesn't help (though, nuclear plants are one of the flavors of facility that are wildly expensive to shut down permanently even if they could get rid of the casks).
Among people who 'are' some religion or other for cultural reasons(because mom and dad were, because everybody is around here, etc.) religious affiliation probably doesn't tell you much, other than that they exhibit normal levels of social conformity.
Among people who go shopping for religions, though, especially if that shopping includes stuff considered slightly exotic (rather than just choosing the generic protestantism whose church offers the best commute times on sunday), why would they be shopping? Because they are looking for something they feel they need. And who might be particularly attracted to a religion that (at least in its westernized flavor) is particularly strongly associated with the focused cultivation of mindfulness and mental stability and general zen stuff? Well, people who feel a certain lack in that department.
Any religion's converts (in an environment with a high degree of choice, particularly) are to be expected to skew heavily toward people who are looking for what that religion is seen as offering.
Bear in mind, he's a lawyer. His job involves selling an argument and he's rarely concerned with who's actually in the right. This is just rhetoric.
I'm hesitant to dismiss him as insincere just because of the sheer, utter, insanity (from the perspective of, say, a value-rational human being who wants to make money by being a lawyer) of his behavior in pretty much all aspects of the case beyond the first opening shot or two (where he might actually have been writing demand letters for a client, just a day on the job).
A good con-man knows when to skip town(which was a hell of a long time ago in this case, there were plenty of situations where he could have just backed down and let the internet's almost-nonexistent attention span solve the problem for him; but instead he doubled down on the crazy). It's possible that Carreon is just a bad con-man; but that level of not knowing when to skip town reeks of a true believer.
Despite being the one who got the ball rolling with the vexatious litigation and absurd threats in the first place, he appears to have learned absolutely nothing from the experience, blaming his failure on the fact that he doesn't have sufficient 'legal remedy' against people calling his idiocy idiotic online, and even manages to drop in a self-pitying line about how lawsuits are just occupying too much of his time.
Guy is so dense and immutable that he could probably be sliced into thin layers and used as armor plate.
(And, since he is a master of good taste and his wife is even crazier, they've given the world http://rapeutation.com/ complete with caricatures (and the guy complains that there aren't enough laws against saying mean things on the internet?) of their enemies. Class act guys, class act.)
Shoving something out of ye olde gravity well is always expensive, if you go over the weight/size limit of one of the reasonably-commodified launch systems, things go from 'expensive' to 'heroically expensive'.
Depending on exactly what trajectory you have in mind, a more massive craft may also require more fuel/more powerful thrusters if you are making any course corrections along the way.
Did the N64 bleed red ink or something? My memory of its reception is that (while there were some limitations in terms of things like video cutscenes compared to much, much, cheaper storage in Sony's disk-based competition), a lot of N64 titles were very well regarded at the time, and the whole system has retained a real nostalgic glow (in a way that, say, the gamecube, arguably a more economically rational system) hasn't.
An actually-successful 3D Mario release, fairly canonical releases of Mario Kart and Smash Bros, a good Zelda, Goldeneye (Christ, has that not aged well at all; but a console shooter that didn't totally blow was pretty serious business at the time)...
I suspect that other would-be users of the orbit (and possibly whiny people on the planet's surface) might object; but it would be fascinating to see whether a radiothermal fuel load (which can be a toasty little fellow even on earth) in hard vacuum would end up shedding enough heat by radiation to remain structurally sound, or whether it would get hot enough to become molten or semi-molten and held together largely by surface tension, or whether the vapor pressure of the material at that temperature would be high enough to generate an expanding cloud of zesty vapor.
Terrible plan, of course; but there are a lot of terrible plans that would be fun to watch.
*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others. This in turn would compromise the trust of the ENTIRE kernel. That trust can take years to build up - but be detroyed in a heartbeat.
If I were in Linus' position, I'd be tempted to build a so-obvious-as-to-be-sarcastic backdoor just for giggles. Something along the lines of Linux Genuine Advantage; but with lots of suspicious TLAs in the comments.
Though, architecturally, a PAM module might be a better place for such a thing.
Hah. Assume they are. What god complexes people have to assume they are worthy of the NSA snooping on them. Be a good person and you have nothing to worry about. Government agencies have snooped on their citizens for decades, remember the analog phone system? Digital cellular still uses the same backbone.
And, of course, advances in technology have had no effect whatsoever on how cheap, per person, surveillance is over the past few decades. None at all, nope, you still have to be radical enough to get three guys wearing headphones and looking real intense allocated to listening to you. Idiot.
Perhaps more importantly for an ostensibly scientific enterprise, he didn't even take advantage of standard of care for his condition. First, he dicked around with some alt-med nonsense, then he tried a real doctor, once things had gotten to the point where his outcome was atypically good.
"they're just going to do what 100 other startups are doing. providing health tracking, health tips, tools to communicate with your physician and so forth. Unique ideas that 100000 others have had."
I don't know if you are thinking small, or just one of those 'optimists' I've read about.
Just think of the value of the sweet, sweet, sweet actuarial data once Google sets to work looking for correlations between medical data (the people with cheap EOLs, the people with expensive ones, anything else that an insurer might want to know), with nonmedical, almost entirely unprotected as a matter of law or fact, consumer web-behavior, interest, location, etc. information!
It'll combine all the most obnoxious aspects of GATTACCA-style eugenic dystopia and targeted advertising!
VUPEN is to a backroom russian exploits dealer what a 'defense contractor' is to a 'gunrunner' or 'arms trafficker'. Same business; but the prices are higher and they pinkie swear that they would never, ever, sell to anybody who is wicked, though they aren't overly forthcoming about who they will sell to.
Well clearly they should have picked their parents better and been born on third base like me.
I'll have you know that my grandaddy pulled himself up by his bootstraps to give me what I have today, so the fact that you can't do the same makes me sick.
If you have a significant portion of a population without commercial value, the question is whether or not they will be allowed to have any political power.
Is that actually still a question? I thought we'd settled it already.
It is strange how a 5% (a plant producing 10% working at half capacity) reduction in capacity can result in large price changes. This is where I have issue with supply/demand pricing. If one can convince buyers something is scarce the price goes up even when the scarcity is not real.
I'd assume that the 'price' being quoted is spot, which you would expect to be more volatile because of the percentage of the RAM capacity that is allocated to entities who buy through longer-term contracts. If a nontrivial percentage of the production was already spoken for (and by the big customers who you don't want to piss off) well before it rolled off the line, an unexpected reduction in supply is going to be taken out largely on people who have no such arrangements in place.
The question will be whether the prices charged by people who do have stable supply contracts will also remain largely stable, or whether they'll take the opportunity to plead RAM price increase as well...
No, thats why MONOPOLIES are stupid and should not be helped by the goverment....alas they dont care so yeah... lets blame the terrorists... they are the real bad guys there.
This is true; but not particularly relevant: RAM manufacture, while it factors into the price of almost everything, is not an industry characterized by particularly brilliant margins or market power. The bigger issue is that semiconductor manufacturing has dangerously high economies of scale (or, alternately, it's damned expensive to spread it out, depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty). This one plant made 10% of the RAM used by the entire world. If Hynix only owned one fab (as opposed to this one and however many others supply the other two thirds of their capacity), they'd be more screwed as a company; but we'd likely still see the same effects. Idle fab capacity is a very, very, expensive thing to waste, so there isn't much incentive to have 'spare' capacity lying around just in case, and a large fab is quite productive indeed, so losing one, even for a modest period, means a significant loss of supply.
Slashdot Mirror
That presumably helped getting (relatively NDA free, no less!) access to the part. Again, I have no idea what Intel says if you want to buy less than a tray worth of anything (much less get detailed assistance/permission, they certainly weren't shy about squishing Nvidia on QPI chipsets...); but the position on the rPI is that (while it is sincerely cheap, and the vendor has no obvious conflicts of interest in selling as many of the things as they can, as uncrippled as they can), it barely matters whether the Gerbers are open or not when the core SoC is practically a special favor from Broadcom.
Intel's availability situation is clearly better for socketed parts (since, even if they won't talk in units of less than a thousand, resellers abound who do whatever they want); but I don't know what the story is for things like chipsets and BGA parts. My personal interest is less in the freedom of the board (since the economics of DIY vs. some pacific-rim slave factory will always be dubious); but the firmware. Intel have, in contrast to their generally good position on graphics, been kind of dicks compared to AMD in terms of Coreboot vs. UEFI+whatever proprietary features Intel has dreamed up these days. An Intel-supported, enough-UEFI-to-actually-be-useful, board would be real news(yeah, Intel has 'Tianocore', which is the OSS implementation of all the boring parts of UEFI; but the good shit, of the sort actually required to do a coreboot port or a fully-open UEFI build, has been lacking for all but the most antique of their gear).
I don't know if Intel would be any different; but my understanding is that the 'openness' complaints about the Pi have something to do with the fact that BCM usually won't even spit on you without an NDA and an order for a zillion trays of parts, so it's nigh-impossible to recreate the system without either a massive minimum order quantity or a special relationship with them.
As you say, production costs, for things like multilayer boards, tend to make having the PCB layout files less practically relevant to most; but you can at least buy small quantity PCB fabrication, though it'll cost you.
But oddly stupid since Intel have open drivers for their own GPUs
It's an ugly story. In their quest to hit lower TDPs a few years back, Intel puked out a bunch of Atoms that are based on SGX540(maybe 545, I forget, doesn't matter from a driver standpoint) GPUs licensed from PowerVR. The 'GMA500', 'GMA600', 'GMA3600', and 'GMA3650' are all of this cursed race. Any of the other GMAs are Intel GPUs, which do indeed have decent drivers.
I have no idea why they went with the horribly shit Atoms for their 'open' board; but they did.
The one thing that might prove interesting is that it is allegedly fullly open (aside from the PowerVR GPU drivers) which (assuming Intel isn't lying or using "'Open' as in a block of magic numbers" definitions, this board, although based on UEFI, might actually be the first Intel product in quite a while to be well documented enough to be a Coreboot/LinuxBIOS target. Even better, it might provide insight into some other products using the same chipsets.
Why is this thing priced like a modern board when it has all out of date components on it? Wake me up when they do the Bay Trail version or slash $100 off of the asking price.
The GMA600 is a real shit sandwich (Oh, sure, I really really want to fuck around with a PowerVR SGX545 and it's utterly shit proprietary driver on my 'open' dev board); but $200 is a steal by the standards of x86 boards designed for embedded purposes (I suspect that there are a bunch of PC/104-format users looking enviously at this board right now, and wondering why Intel didn't answer their prayers instead).
Now, given the prices of Intel's own faster, better, comes-with-case, consumer offerings (their 'Next Unit of Computing' boxes being a good example), this is a poor consumer offering; but it's pretty damn cheap by the standards of similar products.
I suspect that there's at least one other variable: There is a large universe of things that the techies say are safe and doable, if done according to their advice. However, by the time the plan actually gets executed, it is fairly common to discover that... certain liberties were taken... (in fairness to the techies, often against their advice) in some of the expensive-and-boring-safety-features parts of the plan. This leads to a rather smaller universe of things that techies say are safe and doable and which are implemented safely in practice.
Anybody who actually thinks that techies don't know stuff about the world, and science is, like, a social construct, man! is probably a fool.
Anyone who is strongly suspicious that, while the techies do indeed have the knowing and the doing of many things, they may not have the good of the locals at heart (never mind the bean counters and suits at HQ), is just a reasonable student of history.
A pure irrational fear of technology is one thing. The agreement that, yes, technology is powerful; but proposals involving the deployment of power are... not history's most glorious chapter... is much harder to argue with.
Nuclear plants are rather trickier than some industries to redevelop (the fuel casks are stuck in regulatory limbo, the rest of the plant is just a massive structure, much of it radioactive enough to reduce the otherwise significant scrap value and require special procedures, built durable enough that it'll be expensive to demolish) which increases the odds that Maine Yankee HQ will do their best to classify the site as some sort of minimally-operational status in perpetuity, because hiring a couple of guards to wander around and punch the clock is cheaper than fully pulling out, leaving the town with a big derelict structure.
They are hardly alone in that, though. All kinds of industrial processes (especially anything inherited from the good old days when Men Were Men, Cigarettes were a health food, and PCBs were a Miracle of Science), even if their buildings are cheaper to tear down, leave the underlying site in lousy enough shape that it's usually cheaper just to say 'eh, fuck 'em' and choose a greenfield location somewhere else. Even something as minor as a gas station can be Wacky Remediation Fun Time if their storage tank leaked before they went under or moved.
(The only other aspect, though the article is polite, or feckless, enough to ignore it, is that nuclear plants operate under an NRC license, which is of limited duration unless renewed, which requires a variety of testing steps, so their demise is probably rather more predictable than the usual '$FOOCORP moves to China to save 10 cents per widget' story. If your town is basically fucked without its resident nuclear reactor, you really want your town leadership to be well informed(or doing their best to batter down the doors and demand to be made aware) of exactly where in the lifecycle the reactor is, whether HQ is looking for a renewal, whether there are issues that would scuttle that, etc. Predicting a 'Haha, Outsourcing Surprise!' event is relatively challenging. Predicting whether or not a reactor will get recertified or mothballed may not be trivial; but it's a much better defined problem. My guess is that there's a really ugly backstory there. Either the town ignoring the problem to bask in the present, the operator stonewalling/flimflamming the town until it was time to give them the shaft, some of both, some other flavor I'm not thinking of; but that would be the one major wrinkle distinguishing a reactor from any other 'industrial site not easy to remediate'.)
It sounds like the (sadly not atypical) story of what happens to a company town when the company leaves, more or less regardless of the flavor of company.
The fact that a bunch of nuclear waste casks prevent any redevelopment of that part of the site certainly doesn't help (though, nuclear plants are one of the flavors of facility that are wildly expensive to shut down permanently even if they could get rid of the casks).
I'm not sure why this is marked 'troll'.
Among people who 'are' some religion or other for cultural reasons(because mom and dad were, because everybody is around here, etc.) religious affiliation probably doesn't tell you much, other than that they exhibit normal levels of social conformity.
Among people who go shopping for religions, though, especially if that shopping includes stuff considered slightly exotic (rather than just choosing the generic protestantism whose church offers the best commute times on sunday), why would they be shopping? Because they are looking for something they feel they need. And who might be particularly attracted to a religion that (at least in its westernized flavor) is particularly strongly associated with the focused cultivation of mindfulness and mental stability and general zen stuff? Well, people who feel a certain lack in that department.
Any religion's converts (in an environment with a high degree of choice, particularly) are to be expected to skew heavily toward people who are looking for what that religion is seen as offering.
Bear in mind, he's a lawyer. His job involves selling an argument and he's rarely concerned with who's actually in the right. This is just rhetoric.
I'm hesitant to dismiss him as insincere just because of the sheer, utter, insanity (from the perspective of, say, a value-rational human being who wants to make money by being a lawyer) of his behavior in pretty much all aspects of the case beyond the first opening shot or two (where he might actually have been writing demand letters for a client, just a day on the job).
A good con-man knows when to skip town(which was a hell of a long time ago in this case, there were plenty of situations where he could have just backed down and let the internet's almost-nonexistent attention span solve the problem for him; but instead he doubled down on the crazy). It's possible that Carreon is just a bad con-man; but that level of not knowing when to skip town reeks of a true believer.
Despite being the one who got the ball rolling with the vexatious litigation and absurd threats in the first place, he appears to have learned absolutely nothing from the experience, blaming his failure on the fact that he doesn't have sufficient 'legal remedy' against people calling his idiocy idiotic online, and even manages to drop in a self-pitying line about how lawsuits are just occupying too much of his time.
Guy is so dense and immutable that he could probably be sliced into thin layers and used as armor plate.
(And, since he is a master of good taste and his wife is even crazier, they've given the world http://rapeutation.com/ complete with caricatures (and the guy complains that there aren't enough laws against saying mean things on the internet?) of their enemies. Class act guys, class act.)
Launch price.
Shoving something out of ye olde gravity well is always expensive, if you go over the weight/size limit of one of the reasonably-commodified launch systems, things go from 'expensive' to 'heroically expensive'.
Depending on exactly what trajectory you have in mind, a more massive craft may also require more fuel/more powerful thrusters if you are making any course corrections along the way.
Did the N64 bleed red ink or something? My memory of its reception is that (while there were some limitations in terms of things like video cutscenes compared to much, much, cheaper storage in Sony's disk-based competition), a lot of N64 titles were very well regarded at the time, and the whole system has retained a real nostalgic glow (in a way that, say, the gamecube, arguably a more economically rational system) hasn't.
An actually-successful 3D Mario release, fairly canonical releases of Mario Kart and Smash Bros, a good Zelda, Goldeneye (Christ, has that not aged well at all; but a console shooter that didn't totally blow was pretty serious business at the time)...
I suspect that other would-be users of the orbit (and possibly whiny people on the planet's surface) might object; but it would be fascinating to see whether a radiothermal fuel load (which can be a toasty little fellow even on earth) in hard vacuum would end up shedding enough heat by radiation to remain structurally sound, or whether it would get hot enough to become molten or semi-molten and held together largely by surface tension, or whether the vapor pressure of the material at that temperature would be high enough to generate an expanding cloud of zesty vapor.
Terrible plan, of course; but there are a lot of terrible plans that would be fun to watch.
*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others. This in turn would compromise the trust of the ENTIRE kernel. That trust can take years to build up - but be detroyed in a heartbeat.
If I were in Linus' position, I'd be tempted to build a so-obvious-as-to-be-sarcastic backdoor just for giggles. Something along the lines of Linux Genuine Advantage; but with lots of suspicious TLAs in the comments.
Though, architecturally, a PAM module might be a better place for such a thing.
Hah. Assume they are. What god complexes people have to assume they are worthy of the NSA snooping on them. Be a good person and you have nothing to worry about. Government agencies have snooped on their citizens for decades, remember the analog phone system? Digital cellular still uses the same backbone.
And, of course, advances in technology have had no effect whatsoever on how cheap, per person, surveillance is over the past few decades. None at all, nope, you still have to be radical enough to get three guys wearing headphones and looking real intense allocated to listening to you. Idiot.
Perhaps more importantly for an ostensibly scientific enterprise, he didn't even take advantage of standard of care for his condition. First, he dicked around with some alt-med nonsense, then he tried a real doctor, once things had gotten to the point where his outcome was atypically good.
"they're just going to do what 100 other startups are doing. providing health tracking, health tips, tools to communicate with your physician and so forth. Unique ideas that 100000 others have had."
I don't know if you are thinking small, or just one of those 'optimists' I've read about.
Just think of the value of the sweet, sweet, sweet actuarial data once Google sets to work looking for correlations between medical data (the people with cheap EOLs, the people with expensive ones, anything else that an insurer might want to know), with nonmedical, almost entirely unprotected as a matter of law or fact, consumer web-behavior, interest, location, etc. information!
It'll combine all the most obnoxious aspects of GATTACCA-style eugenic dystopia and targeted advertising!
Does it count as a 'design win' or a 'design award for participation' when you award it to yourself?
You'd have to factor in quite the heatsink for such a beast. The ISS active thermal control system is not a small device, and is good for only 70kw.
The astrophotography of an uncooled 100kw reactor in a vacuum would probably be pretty neat; but it wouldn't be a good idea.
VUPEN is to a backroom russian exploits dealer what a 'defense contractor' is to a 'gunrunner' or 'arms trafficker'. Same business; but the prices are higher and they pinkie swear that they would never, ever, sell to anybody who is wicked, though they aren't overly forthcoming about who they will sell to.
Well clearly they should have picked their parents better and been born on third base like me.
I'll have you know that my grandaddy pulled himself up by his bootstraps to give me what I have today, so the fact that you can't do the same makes me sick.
If you have a significant portion of a population without commercial value, the question is whether or not they will be allowed to have any political power.
Is that actually still a question? I thought we'd settled it already.
It is strange how a 5% (a plant producing 10% working at half capacity) reduction in capacity can result in large price changes. This is where I have issue with supply/demand pricing. If one can convince buyers something is scarce the price goes up even when the scarcity is not real.
I'd assume that the 'price' being quoted is spot, which you would expect to be more volatile because of the percentage of the RAM capacity that is allocated to entities who buy through longer-term contracts. If a nontrivial percentage of the production was already spoken for (and by the big customers who you don't want to piss off) well before it rolled off the line, an unexpected reduction in supply is going to be taken out largely on people who have no such arrangements in place.
The question will be whether the prices charged by people who do have stable supply contracts will also remain largely stable, or whether they'll take the opportunity to plead RAM price increase as well...
No, thats why MONOPOLIES are stupid and should not be helped by the goverment....alas they dont care so yeah... lets blame the terrorists... they are the real bad guys there.
This is true; but not particularly relevant: RAM manufacture, while it factors into the price of almost everything, is not an industry characterized by particularly brilliant margins or market power. The bigger issue is that semiconductor manufacturing has dangerously high economies of scale (or, alternately, it's damned expensive to spread it out, depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty). This one plant made 10% of the RAM used by the entire world. If Hynix only owned one fab (as opposed to this one and however many others supply the other two thirds of their capacity), they'd be more screwed as a company; but we'd likely still see the same effects. Idle fab capacity is a very, very, expensive thing to waste, so there isn't much incentive to have 'spare' capacity lying around just in case, and a large fab is quite productive indeed, so losing one, even for a modest period, means a significant loss of supply.