Unless Google use their $80bn to acquire something tangable, their bubble is going to burst eventually.
Their revenue is almost all ad sales, and if they started charging for their free services, we all know we'd find something else that was free.
Their doom may be inevitable. Question is... if the bubble does burst, and billions are lost (AGAIN) will there be lawsuits and jail time... or will it just be a case of "well, if you can't afford to lose, you shouldn't invest"?
I've often pondered on what would happen if we had, say, some sort of nuclear war that put all the current methods of manufacture out of action.
Chances are most of the tech centers where engineers live will be gone - and with them the information.
Chances are the only surviving, and inhabitable (for the next 10,000 years or so) regions will be places like South America, Africa, northern and central Australia. You have to boot-strap the world from there.
There will be batteries and appliances for years afterwards, but the batteries will die out. Maybe some solar powered calculators will survive, but the infrastructure and "start with nothing" knowledge will probably be non-existant, and the priorities will be food, water and basic survival.
Over time, new societies will develop, new kingdoms formed and a new world order. With it will come organization and industrialization. It will take hundreds of years.
Am I the only person who wants ECC in mainstream desktop chipsets?
I kit out all my new machines with at least 1GB RAM and I want long uptimes on all my Windows, Linux and FreeBSD machines. I really want ECC RAM, but it seems that only Intel's server chipsets support it.
It's built-in to the Athlon64 memory controller, right?
You'd think Intel would be more on the ball.
Of course, finding even an Athlon64 motherboard that actually ENABLED ECC is a challenge.
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Unless Google use their $80bn to acquire something tangable, their bubble is going to burst eventually. Their revenue is almost all ad sales, and if they started charging for their free services, we all know we'd find something else that was free. Their doom may be inevitable. Question is... if the bubble does burst, and billions are lost (AGAIN) will there be lawsuits and jail time... or will it just be a case of "well, if you can't afford to lose, you shouldn't invest"?
Chances are most of the tech centers where engineers live will be gone - and with them the information.
Chances are the only surviving, and inhabitable (for the next 10,000 years or so) regions will be places like South America, Africa, northern and central Australia. You have to boot-strap the world from there.
There will be batteries and appliances for years afterwards, but the batteries will die out. Maybe some solar powered calculators will survive, but the infrastructure and "start with nothing" knowledge will probably be non-existant, and the priorities will be food, water and basic survival.
Over time, new societies will develop, new kingdoms formed and a new world order. With it will come organization and industrialization. It will take hundreds of years.
Still... you've got to laugh.
Am I the only person who wants ECC in mainstream desktop chipsets?
I kit out all my new machines with at least 1GB RAM and I want long uptimes on all my Windows, Linux and FreeBSD machines. I really want ECC RAM, but it seems that only Intel's server chipsets support it.
It's built-in to the Athlon64 memory controller, right?
You'd think Intel would be more on the ball.
Of course, finding even an Athlon64 motherboard that actually ENABLED ECC is a challenge.