Surely nVidia's decision to enable their older cards to run ray tracing has nothing to do with Crysis demoing real time ray tracing on AMD GPUs a couple days ago. As Cryengine has shown, real time ray tracing can be done in software without the need for specialized hardware accelerators. This kinda makes the main selling point of the GeForce 20 series more or less moot.
AMT doesn't need VTd turned on to access the network, so keeping VTd off for that reason does absolutely nothing. AMT has its own dedicated side band access to the network hardware. AMT only works with Intel networking gear (NIC/Wi-Fi) so the AMT firmware has all the drivers for the NIC built in. Actually, VTd HELPS mitigate AMT concerns because with it turned on AMT is unable to execute arbitrary DMA reads/writes to system RAM, VTd limits AMT's DMA to only the ranges of RAM that the OS allows.
By the way... there is a much better way to "stop Intel AMT"... just don't buy a system that is "VPro" branded. If the system doesn't have VPro then AMT isn't even present... it gets permanently fused off at the Intel factory. Intel has a special sticker for VPro, so labeling of systems is very clear: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/intel-vpro-faq
Carbon Dioxide is a very stable molecule, getting it to react requires a large amount of input energy. While TFA make it sound like we are gaining energy from this process, there is no free lunch.
The reason why this reaction produces energy is because it is consuming pure metallic sodium and converting it to sodium bicarbonate. Pure sodium does not exist in nature at all, because it is so reactive. Manufacturing metallic sodium is an extremely energy intensive process that involves splitting molten salt (Sodium Chloride) into sodium and chlorine gas using electrolysis. This is Downs' Process. The sodium bicarbonate that this process produces has industrial applications, some of them involve reactions that release the CO2 we just spent of ton of energy capturing back into the atomsphere, baking breads and cakes for example.
Any method that involves electrolysis is going to use a ton of energy. If we are going the electrolysis route, then might as well produce hydrocarbons using electrolysis to convert water and CO2 to syngas, which can then be used to produce hydrocarbons via the Fischer–Tropsch process. Hydrocarbons are way more useful from an industrial standpoint. The most obvious is we can burn them to power legacy Internal Combustion Engine vehicles, which closes the carbon feedback loop; but that is just one use. Hydrocarbons can be used as feedstock for all kinds of organic chemistry processes, we can make tons of plastics, polymers, lubricants, carbon fiber, etc. All of these things cannot be produced without oil mining today. The nice thing about hydrocarbon synthesis is that it can replace mined fossil fuels in all our existing petrochemical manufacturing processes. The same cannot be said about baking soda.
As someone who writes BIOS for a living, no we can't go back to legacy BIOS at this point. Chipset initialization has gotten too complex to fit in the 1 MB of RAM allowed by 16 bit real mode. UEFI is actually a big upgrade for firmware engineers since it natively supports the C language and 64 bit long mode. None of the silicon released by Intel or AMD in the last 5 years would be bootable with 1 MB of RAM.
I fully agree with Microsoft that UEFI has a forking problem. But that is caused by the fact that BIOS vendors take tianocore as a baseline and extend it. The root of the issue is that tianocore itself does not provide a complete UEFI firmware implementation, it gets about 40% of the way there and expects the Silicon vendors (Intel, AMD, NVidia, Qualcomm, etc.) and BIOS vendors (AMI, Phoenix, Insyde, Biosoft, etc.) to fill in the rest with proprietary code. This problem is actually almost identical to the Android fragmentation problem. But really what Microsoft has done here is create another fork for their Surface products.
The good thing is that Microsoft has open sourced a lot of that fork and have pushed the percentage forward from 40% to maybe 50 or 60%. If you look at what they have released though it is very customized for Surface... they have come up with their own answers for a lot of stuff that the UEFI specification already has answers for; the BIOS setup menu/HII database being the most notable. The percentage gained could be much higher if they didn't insist on duplicating code already in tianocore just because they think they know better. Separately, the tianocore guys are also trying to solve the fragmentation problem. A complete open source UEFI firmware implementation is under development right now: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/devel-MinPlatform I am one of the active contributors to tianocore. It is my hope that if Microsoft is truly interested in trying to solve the fragmentation problem that they are willing to work with tianocore and contribute to it instead of building their own competing open source community.
The one thing that all of us should keep an eye on is the potential for a Microsoft attempt to use the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program to force every PC on the planet to use MU. Creating a firmware mono-culture would give Microsoft much more control over the PC industry than Windows itself already affords them. They could turn every PC into nothing more than a Surface with a different OEM logo on the lid. It's certainly one way of solving UEFI's forking issue, but it would significantly strengthen the walled garden they are trying to build with Windows 10 at the same time.
So... there are less a-holes with a juvenile sense of humor writing annoying programs... are we really supposed to lament this as a loss? My guess is they all grew up and now write bitcoin mining worms.
The fact that the Internet's design allows this behavior has been known for decades. The only thing that is new is China was caught doing it, though probably most world governments have done it by now. That is why many in the industry are pushing for 100% HTTPS adoption. It's free and easy now thanks to https://letsencrypt.org/
If it is important to the richest nation on earth then the richest nation on earth can damn well pay market rates for it.
I think for a lot of the younger tech talent, its about more than just pay. As an employee of Facebook/Google/Amazon/etc. you can go in to work at 10pm wearing a T-Shirt and sandals, not fill in a time card, and often have a good lunch paid for by the company, and usually have admin access to your own personal development machine... the culture in a government office could not be further from this.
Giving this same level of pay and benefits to a government employee would be seen as egregious waste of taxpayer money and it would end up plastered all over Fox News/CNN/MSNBC/etc. as an example of gross government excess. Uncle Sam can't be seen as wasting the people's hard-earned money, so the best accommodations for a government employee are equivalent to the typical dingy DMV office. The government can't compete with private employers purely based on our social expectations of them.
1.5 oz would be a very light beer, my guess is that number is taken from Bud Light. Most craft micro-brews would be in the 3-8 oz range. Still your number holds up well. The price for high quality malted barley is more like ~$1/lb, most of that price difference is from the malting though. The ~17% price increase in raw barley would probably translate to a ~1% price increase in malted barley purchased by the brewing company.
This will hurt meat prices much more than beer prices.
Under the leadership of this nutjob the Mozilla Foundation's administrative expenses increased 20% to $60 million as of 2016 their most recent tax filing. I've always wondered how the Mozilla Foundation has been blowing $360 million a year, given how terrible Firefox has gotten.
I'm sure it will have broad benefits to Google's bank account, both inside and outside of China. This is a new ethical low for Google. They are willing to blatantly facilitate human rights violations by a volatile autocratic regime, and at the same time have the gall to lie to US Senators about it just to make a quick buck.
Well...Wikileaks is not exactly an equal opportunity leaker. In retrospect there's no higher morality to it's actions or the "materials" released.
At this point it is extremely clear that Assange is nothing more than one of Putin's puppets. Wikileaks is nothing more than an attempt to weaken the soft power that western democracies project. All part of a grand plan to rebuild the Russian empire with a Putin dynasty.
Probably just another con-artist trying to scam venture capitalists. Extraordinary claims like 2-3x better energy density requires extraordinary evidence.
Intel has the same fundamental problem with foundry that AMD had 10 years ago. Every 3rd party company does not trust Intel to prioritize their products over Intel's own products. Intel will always build their own products on the latest process node first. If you fab with Intel then your wafers will always get 2nd priority over Intel's own wafers. The only way that is not the case is if you are such a huge customer that your contract requires Intel to construct an entire new factory just for you. Then you have to be able to guarantee an enormous wafer volume... the only company large enough to generate that much demand is Apple. If you are smaller than Apple, then you are competing with Intel's own products in the same factory. So basically, you either have to be a huge volume customer or a small volume customer, otherwise a fundamental conflict of interest exists. If you are small volume, then you also have the problem that once you threaten to move back to TSMC Intel might just buy your company like what happened with Altera.
AMD realized this, came to the (correct!) conclusion that their own products would not generate enough volume to pay for building a 32nm fab. So the only way to get significant 3rd party foundry business was to spin off their manufacturing group as a separate company (Global Foundries.) That way Global Foundries could be a neutral 3rd party that would take orders from anyone. Intel would have to become a fabless company and sell their fab to get significant foundry business.
TI doesn't have state-of-the-art lithography for digital. They gave up on the Moore's Law race 10 years ago after they reached 45nm. TI realized during the development of WinRT that building CPUs requires very expensive fabs and if you are not an x86 supplier then your only option is to make ARM chips, which is a race to the bottom with very thin margins. TI realized they can make more money building mixed signal designs on older process.
Let say your a detective and have a witness that gave you a physical description of a suspect, but doesn't know the person's name (a very common scenario.) It seems like this would be a good way to find that suspect in a crowd. Frankly this is a sensationalist news piece.
What's wrong with stopping at Photoshop CS6 and never upgrading?
The last officially supported operating system for CS6 was Win8.1 and OS X 10.9. And Adobe is no longer issuing bugfixes for CS6. While it still works on the newest OSes and hardware, I suspect their is a fair chance of it not working on the next macOS release since Apple is dropping all 32 bit software support (and along with it a fair number of legacy frameworks like Carbon.) Given that Photoshop has been on the Mac since the 1980s it would not surprise me if a little bit of legacy code was still lurking somewhere that Adobe will end up finding and fixing during next year's WWDC/macOS release cycle.
The situation is better on Windows of course since MSFT is much more careful about backwards compatibility, but even in the Windows ecosystem changes come along every 5 years or so that break older software. Vista UAC and the 64 bit transition come to mind. My guess is the next big shift in the Windows ecosystem is deprecation/removal of 32 bit application support, and there is a chance that ARM will become meaningfully relevant... but I'm not holding my breath on that (look at the history of all non-x86 Windows systems: NT4 Alpha, WinCE, Win8RT... a new manager comes in and the company losses interest every time.)
So RISC-V's market is going to be mostly in non-exposed, internal processors running secret unreplacable firmware doing unknown things our GPUs and SSDs... Kinda like the Intel ME and AMD PSP. Are we supposed to feel good about that?
I find it ironic that the first thing that comes out of an open CPU design is more of the closed systems that supposedly RISC-V was designed to discourage. I don't think we can blindly apply the same approach to open hardware that was taken for open software, the economics of hardware production is very different than the economics of distributing software on the Internet.
One of the many big problems with bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is that the bitcoin whales own so much of the available coins that it enables collusion between a very small number of people to result in massive changes in the price of bitcoin. This makes the bitcoin market ripe for "pump and dump" securities fraud.
Without a doubt, at least one of the bitcoin whales works for Hashflare, and was aware of the planned timing of the most recent "pump," which happened 3 days ago. Hashflare's customers bought and paid for 1 year contracts ahead of time. Hashflare used that up-front money to buy all the ASICs and GPUs to set up their mining data center. Now in theory, the contract is established obligating Hashflare to transfer all of the mined bitcoins to their contract holder's wallets for the next year. But now that the most recent pump was pretty successful... they would rather keep those coins for themselves and reap the profits that rightfully belong to the people who took the risk of buying their contracts up-front. Never-mind that they wouldn't have all that mining hardware if it wasn't for the investors that bought their contracts. This is blatant securities fraud, these guys should go to jail for it.
This is probably nVidia's response to the market heating up.
First, it looks like AMD Vega 20 is going to outperform Pascal. Based on remarks from nVidia's CEO, the next-gen Turing architecture is probably going to be released in 2019. Since Vega 20 will probably be out this year, for the first time in a while AMD will hold the GPU performance crown for about one year, maybe more if Turning doesn't deliver. On top of that, for the first time in a decade Intel is now a big wildcard. Current rumor is Intel will be releasing a discrete GPU in 2020. Intel hired the guy from AMD that lead the development of Vega, so chances are Intel actually means business this time.
To sum it all up, things are not looking very good for nVidia right now. So they are acting early to prevent journalists from reporting a possible fall from grace if it were to happen in the near future.
At least Microsoft learned from the botched deployment of RS2 (aka Redstone-2, or the "Creators Update") which didn't work well on anything older than Skylake for several months. Looks like it is going to take them similar amounts of time to stabilize RS4 (Spring Creators Update... I wish they would just call it RS4 instead of coming up with meaningless marketing names) but at least they won't hold people's machines hostage in the meantime.
This is a natural consequence of the new world order Microsoft established with Windows 10. Now, the more money you pay for your Windows license, the more stability you get. At the bottom rung is the "insiders" who can actually install Windows totally for free. But they will always and forever be using beta releases, never will they be on a officially released version. Instead of paying MSFT with money, you pay them by giving away free QA. Next up is the people with the "Home" license. Most people are in this category. They get the newest release forced up their butt every 6 months. Next up if you paid for the "Pro" license you get a checkbox that lets you delay the newest release until another release is given after that. Finally, if you pay through the teeth for an enterprise license, then you get the Windows 7 level of service, highly tested stable releases every 3 years.
I'm curious what's considered an "obsolete CPU architecture" if a Powerbook 100 is still supported.
The full list of dropped CPUs is Blackfin, CRIS, FRV, M32R, Metag, MN10300, Score, and Tile. Also under consideration are Unicore32 and Hexagon, but they are not officially gone yet. Apparently this change removes about half a million lines of code, a substantial reduction in complexity. I had never heard of any of these before and I suspect most other people haven't either, so I don't think they will be missed.
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Surely nVidia's decision to enable their older cards to run ray tracing has nothing to do with Crysis demoing real time ray tracing on AMD GPUs a couple days ago. As Cryengine has shown, real time ray tracing can be done in software without the need for specialized hardware accelerators. This kinda makes the main selling point of the GeForce 20 series more or less moot.
AMT doesn't need VTd turned on to access the network, so keeping VTd off for that reason does absolutely nothing. AMT has its own dedicated side band access to the network hardware. AMT only works with Intel networking gear (NIC/Wi-Fi) so the AMT firmware has all the drivers for the NIC built in. Actually, VTd HELPS mitigate AMT concerns because with it turned on AMT is unable to execute arbitrary DMA reads/writes to system RAM, VTd limits AMT's DMA to only the ranges of RAM that the OS allows.
By the way... there is a much better way to "stop Intel AMT"... just don't buy a system that is "VPro" branded. If the system doesn't have VPro then AMT isn't even present... it gets permanently fused off at the Intel factory. Intel has a special sticker for VPro, so labeling of systems is very clear: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/intel-vpro-faq
For this reason, Windows now has IOMMU virtualization enabled to prevent DMA attacks (starting with Windows 10 RS4/1803/April 2018 Update): https://twitter.com/AmarSaar/status/985618204184768513 In conjunction, tianocore also has IOMMU based DMA protection for 2 years now: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/tree/master/IntelSiliconPkg/Feature/VTd. So even if the OS isn't up yet DMA attacks are still locked out. Assuming you are running a recent OS and firmware, this is now a non-issue.
For this reason, Windows now has IOMMU virtualization enabled to prevent DMA attacks (starting with Windows 10 RS4/1803/April 2018 Update): https://twitter.com/AmarSaar/status/985618204184768513
In conjunction, tianocore also has IOMMU based DMA protection for 2 years now: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/tree/master/IntelSiliconPkg/Feature/VTd. So even if the OS isn't up yet DMA attacks are still locked out.
Assuming you are running a recent OS and firmware, this is now a non-issue.
Carbon Dioxide is a very stable molecule, getting it to react requires a large amount of input energy. While TFA make it sound like we are gaining energy from this process, there is no free lunch.
The reason why this reaction produces energy is because it is consuming pure metallic sodium and converting it to sodium bicarbonate. Pure sodium does not exist in nature at all, because it is so reactive. Manufacturing metallic sodium is an extremely energy intensive process that involves splitting molten salt (Sodium Chloride) into sodium and chlorine gas using electrolysis. This is Downs' Process. The sodium bicarbonate that this process produces has industrial applications, some of them involve reactions that release the CO2 we just spent of ton of energy capturing back into the atomsphere, baking breads and cakes for example.
Any method that involves electrolysis is going to use a ton of energy. If we are going the electrolysis route, then might as well produce hydrocarbons using electrolysis to convert water and CO2 to syngas, which can then be used to produce hydrocarbons via the Fischer–Tropsch process. Hydrocarbons are way more useful from an industrial standpoint. The most obvious is we can burn them to power legacy Internal Combustion Engine vehicles, which closes the carbon feedback loop; but that is just one use. Hydrocarbons can be used as feedstock for all kinds of organic chemistry processes, we can make tons of plastics, polymers, lubricants, carbon fiber, etc. All of these things cannot be produced without oil mining today. The nice thing about hydrocarbon synthesis is that it can replace mined fossil fuels in all our existing petrochemical manufacturing processes. The same cannot be said about baking soda.
As someone who writes BIOS for a living, no we can't go back to legacy BIOS at this point. Chipset initialization has gotten too complex to fit in the 1 MB of RAM allowed by 16 bit real mode. UEFI is actually a big upgrade for firmware engineers since it natively supports the C language and 64 bit long mode. None of the silicon released by Intel or AMD in the last 5 years would be bootable with 1 MB of RAM.
"Apple pulls Netflix from App Store; shifts focus to Apple original paid programming"
I fully agree with Microsoft that UEFI has a forking problem. But that is caused by the fact that BIOS vendors take tianocore as a baseline and extend it. The root of the issue is that tianocore itself does not provide a complete UEFI firmware implementation, it gets about 40% of the way there and expects the Silicon vendors (Intel, AMD, NVidia, Qualcomm, etc.) and BIOS vendors (AMI, Phoenix, Insyde, Biosoft, etc.) to fill in the rest with proprietary code. This problem is actually almost identical to the Android fragmentation problem. But really what Microsoft has done here is create another fork for their Surface products.
The good thing is that Microsoft has open sourced a lot of that fork and have pushed the percentage forward from 40% to maybe 50 or 60%. If you look at what they have released though it is very customized for Surface... they have come up with their own answers for a lot of stuff that the UEFI specification already has answers for; the BIOS setup menu/HII database being the most notable. The percentage gained could be much higher if they didn't insist on duplicating code already in tianocore just because they think they know better. Separately, the tianocore guys are also trying to solve the fragmentation problem. A complete open source UEFI firmware implementation is under development right now: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/devel-MinPlatform I am one of the active contributors to tianocore. It is my hope that if Microsoft is truly interested in trying to solve the fragmentation problem that they are willing to work with tianocore and contribute to it instead of building their own competing open source community.
The one thing that all of us should keep an eye on is the potential for a Microsoft attempt to use the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program to force every PC on the planet to use MU. Creating a firmware mono-culture would give Microsoft much more control over the PC industry than Windows itself already affords them. They could turn every PC into nothing more than a Surface with a different OEM logo on the lid. It's certainly one way of solving UEFI's forking issue, but it would significantly strengthen the walled garden they are trying to build with Windows 10 at the same time.
So... there are less a-holes with a juvenile sense of humor writing annoying programs... are we really supposed to lament this as a loss? My guess is they all grew up and now write bitcoin mining worms.
The fact that the Internet's design allows this behavior has been known for decades. The only thing that is new is China was caught doing it, though probably most world governments have done it by now. That is why many in the industry are pushing for 100% HTTPS adoption. It's free and easy now thanks to https://letsencrypt.org/
If it is important to the richest nation on earth then the richest nation on earth can damn well pay market rates for it.
I think for a lot of the younger tech talent, its about more than just pay. As an employee of Facebook/Google/Amazon/etc. you can go in to work at 10pm wearing a T-Shirt and sandals, not fill in a time card, and often have a good lunch paid for by the company, and usually have admin access to your own personal development machine... the culture in a government office could not be further from this.
Giving this same level of pay and benefits to a government employee would be seen as egregious waste of taxpayer money and it would end up plastered all over Fox News/CNN/MSNBC/etc. as an example of gross government excess. Uncle Sam can't be seen as wasting the people's hard-earned money, so the best accommodations for a government employee are equivalent to the typical dingy DMV office. The government can't compete with private employers purely based on our social expectations of them.
1.5 oz would be a very light beer, my guess is that number is taken from Bud Light. Most craft micro-brews would be in the 3-8 oz range. Still your number holds up well. The price for high quality malted barley is more like ~$1/lb, most of that price difference is from the malting though. The ~17% price increase in raw barley would probably translate to a ~1% price increase in malted barley purchased by the brewing company.
This will hurt meat prices much more than beer prices.
Under the leadership of this nutjob the Mozilla Foundation's administrative expenses increased 20% to $60 million as of 2016 their most recent tax filing. I've always wondered how the Mozilla Foundation has been blowing $360 million a year, given how terrible Firefox has gotten.
I'm sure it will have broad benefits to Google's bank account, both inside and outside of China. This is a new ethical low for Google. They are willing to blatantly facilitate human rights violations by a volatile autocratic regime, and at the same time have the gall to lie to US Senators about it just to make a quick buck.
Well...Wikileaks is not exactly an equal opportunity leaker. In retrospect there's no higher morality to it's actions or the "materials" released.
At this point it is extremely clear that Assange is nothing more than one of Putin's puppets. Wikileaks is nothing more than an attempt to weaken the soft power that western democracies project. All part of a grand plan to rebuild the Russian empire with a Putin dynasty.
Probably just another con-artist trying to scam venture capitalists. Extraordinary claims like 2-3x better energy density requires extraordinary evidence.
Intel has the same fundamental problem with foundry that AMD had 10 years ago. Every 3rd party company does not trust Intel to prioritize their products over Intel's own products. Intel will always build their own products on the latest process node first. If you fab with Intel then your wafers will always get 2nd priority over Intel's own wafers. The only way that is not the case is if you are such a huge customer that your contract requires Intel to construct an entire new factory just for you. Then you have to be able to guarantee an enormous wafer volume... the only company large enough to generate that much demand is Apple. If you are smaller than Apple, then you are competing with Intel's own products in the same factory. So basically, you either have to be a huge volume customer or a small volume customer, otherwise a fundamental conflict of interest exists. If you are small volume, then you also have the problem that once you threaten to move back to TSMC Intel might just buy your company like what happened with Altera.
AMD realized this, came to the (correct!) conclusion that their own products would not generate enough volume to pay for building a 32nm fab. So the only way to get significant 3rd party foundry business was to spin off their manufacturing group as a separate company (Global Foundries.) That way Global Foundries could be a neutral 3rd party that would take orders from anyone. Intel would have to become a fabless company and sell their fab to get significant foundry business.
TI doesn't have state-of-the-art lithography for digital. They gave up on the Moore's Law race 10 years ago after they reached 45nm. TI realized during the development of WinRT that building CPUs requires very expensive fabs and if you are not an x86 supplier then your only option is to make ARM chips, which is a race to the bottom with very thin margins. TI realized they can make more money building mixed signal designs on older process.
Let say your a detective and have a witness that gave you a physical description of a suspect, but doesn't know the person's name (a very common scenario.) It seems like this would be a good way to find that suspect in a crowd. Frankly this is a sensationalist news piece.
What's wrong with stopping at Photoshop CS6 and never upgrading?
The last officially supported operating system for CS6 was Win8.1 and OS X 10.9. And Adobe is no longer issuing bugfixes for CS6. While it still works on the newest OSes and hardware, I suspect their is a fair chance of it not working on the next macOS release since Apple is dropping all 32 bit software support (and along with it a fair number of legacy frameworks like Carbon.) Given that Photoshop has been on the Mac since the 1980s it would not surprise me if a little bit of legacy code was still lurking somewhere that Adobe will end up finding and fixing during next year's WWDC/macOS release cycle.
The situation is better on Windows of course since MSFT is much more careful about backwards compatibility, but even in the Windows ecosystem changes come along every 5 years or so that break older software. Vista UAC and the 64 bit transition come to mind. My guess is the next big shift in the Windows ecosystem is deprecation/removal of 32 bit application support, and there is a chance that ARM will become meaningfully relevant... but I'm not holding my breath on that (look at the history of all non-x86 Windows systems: NT4 Alpha, WinCE, Win8RT... a new manager comes in and the company losses interest every time.)
So RISC-V's market is going to be mostly in non-exposed, internal processors running secret unreplacable firmware doing unknown things our GPUs and SSDs... Kinda like the Intel ME and AMD PSP. Are we supposed to feel good about that?
I find it ironic that the first thing that comes out of an open CPU design is more of the closed systems that supposedly RISC-V was designed to discourage. I don't think we can blindly apply the same approach to open hardware that was taken for open software, the economics of hardware production is very different than the economics of distributing software on the Internet.
One of the many big problems with bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is that the bitcoin whales own so much of the available coins that it enables collusion between a very small number of people to result in massive changes in the price of bitcoin. This makes the bitcoin market ripe for "pump and dump" securities fraud.
Without a doubt, at least one of the bitcoin whales works for Hashflare, and was aware of the planned timing of the most recent "pump," which happened 3 days ago. Hashflare's customers bought and paid for 1 year contracts ahead of time. Hashflare used that up-front money to buy all the ASICs and GPUs to set up their mining data center. Now in theory, the contract is established obligating Hashflare to transfer all of the mined bitcoins to their contract holder's wallets for the next year. But now that the most recent pump was pretty successful... they would rather keep those coins for themselves and reap the profits that rightfully belong to the people who took the risk of buying their contracts up-front. Never-mind that they wouldn't have all that mining hardware if it wasn't for the investors that bought their contracts. This is blatant securities fraud, these guys should go to jail for it.
This is probably nVidia's response to the market heating up.
First, it looks like AMD Vega 20 is going to outperform Pascal. Based on remarks from nVidia's CEO, the next-gen Turing architecture is probably going to be released in 2019. Since Vega 20 will probably be out this year, for the first time in a while AMD will hold the GPU performance crown for about one year, maybe more if Turning doesn't deliver. On top of that, for the first time in a decade Intel is now a big wildcard. Current rumor is Intel will be releasing a discrete GPU in 2020. Intel hired the guy from AMD that lead the development of Vega, so chances are Intel actually means business this time.
To sum it all up, things are not looking very good for nVidia right now. So they are acting early to prevent journalists from reporting a possible fall from grace if it were to happen in the near future.
At least Microsoft learned from the botched deployment of RS2 (aka Redstone-2, or the "Creators Update") which didn't work well on anything older than Skylake for several months. Looks like it is going to take them similar amounts of time to stabilize RS4 (Spring Creators Update... I wish they would just call it RS4 instead of coming up with meaningless marketing names) but at least they won't hold people's machines hostage in the meantime.
This is a natural consequence of the new world order Microsoft established with Windows 10. Now, the more money you pay for your Windows license, the more stability you get. At the bottom rung is the "insiders" who can actually install Windows totally for free. But they will always and forever be using beta releases, never will they be on a officially released version. Instead of paying MSFT with money, you pay them by giving away free QA. Next up is the people with the "Home" license. Most people are in this category. They get the newest release forced up their butt every 6 months. Next up if you paid for the "Pro" license you get a checkbox that lets you delay the newest release until another release is given after that. Finally, if you pay through the teeth for an enterprise license, then you get the Windows 7 level of service, highly tested stable releases every 3 years.
I'm curious what's considered an "obsolete CPU architecture" if a Powerbook 100 is still supported.
The full list of dropped CPUs is Blackfin, CRIS, FRV, M32R, Metag, MN10300, Score, and Tile. Also under consideration are Unicore32 and Hexagon, but they are not officially gone yet. Apparently this change removes about half a million lines of code, a substantial reduction in complexity. I had never heard of any of these before and I suspect most other people haven't either, so I don't think they will be missed.