My understanding years ago was that the service was surviving off of people who thought they still needed the service to access the internet even if they had broadband or kept paying for it even if they weren’t using it. Not sure if that is true or was just speculation.
They definitely made more than a little money from this. For example, my ex–mother-in-law kept paying for AOL dial-up after she was already paying for AT&T DSL, thinking that was the only way she could keep using AOL. And yes, she would still log in through the AOL browser.
My anecdotal finding is good is closer to 40-60 percent more than in 2019. Perhaps the food staples haven’t gone up quite as much but everything else has.
The hits keep coming for Intel. They can’t catch a break. The board should have never fired Pat Gelsinger. He had the right plan. It was always going to be a painful turnaround and they just had no stomach for it.
It is a bubble. It will collapse. The only thing that might cushion the collapse a bit is that most of the capital is from large tech companies that can absorb the fallout and pivot to the next thing. The hardware and infrastructure should be able to be leveraged for other things.
If the PRC were to do it, I would imagine you would try to do it under the Trump administration as he is anti-interventionist and sees the world as a series of regional fiefdoms led by the strongest regional player--Asia, to him, is China's region. This is in sharp contrast to every prior US administration and with the Biden administration in particular coming out with the strongest rhetoric regarding any potential invasion.
The action on Iran proves otherwise, especially since his entire anti-interventionist wing was squealing that World War III would start if he did bomb the nuclear sites.
Those around the president have been pretty clear that the US will defend Taiwan until the US is capable of its own supply of leading edge semi conductors. Taiwan is very easy to defend with the harsh ocean separating them, especially since North Korea gives the US an excuse to plant massive amounts of long range missiles in SK.
There are no surprises when attacks start in the era of real time world video satellites.
I think the limited actions in Iran are not at all comparable to the commitment and risks involved in directly defending Taiwan from invasion or naval / aerial blockade. With that said, I do think that the US is likely to intervene in some capacity regardless of admin, but slightly less so with the current admin.
I am pretty sure the US is investing hard into naval drones. There's a reason Russia cannot use it's naval fleet in Ukraine as cheap torpedos and drones destroy ships.
Ships are basically sitting ducks if they are within range of drones. I am surprised better anti drone weaponry hasn’t been deployed. I would think bird shot cannons would be highly effective.
The only thing saving the dollar is a lack of suitable replacement. Trust in the PRC is lower than even the current highly politicized United States, so the Yuan is out. The replacement could be an index of currents tied to G7 or BRICS countries, but that likely gets complicated.
specifically the yuan is out because of the capital controls on the currency. because of the massive population in china even a minor shift in currency control could cause huge swings in the reserve value.
But that is always the case, when one is dominant: No options are nearly as good. Maybe the.dollar is riskier than today, but are there any other countries less risky?
Sports teams pay Ronaldo, Messi, and Curry because they win games and that puts fans in seats and attracts sponsors that pay those teams money and turn a profit.
When someone had a successful business model that offsets the incredible costs let me know, but it is all hypothetical.
Zuckerberg is one of the reasons I think AI is a bubble and overhyped. He lacks vision. Remember when they renamed the company Meta and the metaverse was the whole future of the company?
This is the same thing. It is the new shiny tech demo that is really cool. And technically works really, really well and has some real uses, but that doesn’t make a multi billion dollar business.
Everyone thought AMD was done. Intel is going through a difficult transition, but if they can make 18a /14a work and keep improving their GPU line we could be having the same conversation about AMD in 10 years.
I used to be a die-hard Intel customer, and recommended to everyone that asked me what to but, to buy Intel. That has changed. Now it's price/performance that matters more than brand. Intel also had a few missteps that made the brand lose a bit of its luster.
My most recent computer is AMD Ryzen based, but we just bought an Intel-based Dell for my partner because the price/performance was better than comparable AMD machines at the time, possibly due to a sale. But the Intel chip is a lot faster than my laptop, so now I'm a little bit jealous of the Intel machine.
If you're comparing laptop to desktop keep in mind a lot of those top out at 5 to 45w (gaming) and desktop chips are 45-65w to 300w (threadripper) and have a lot more cooling behind them.
I do have repeated, annoying instability with my Ryzen 5900X desktop. I find AMD to have a much narrower setup window in terms of memory speed, timing, etc. and that is before any kind of overclocking. And the motherboard / bios firmware situation always seems a bit more sketchy for AMD.
Maybe it is just bad luck on my end, but I have not had those issues with Intel in the past or currently.
It's bad luck on your end. I have 3 AMD-based "desktops", never had a single problem with any of them. I just throw whatever memory in and it just works. These are being used more as servers than desktops, with large RAID arrays, HBA cards, tape drives, etc. They're consumer-level systems - Ryzen 7 5700G, Ryzen 5 2600, Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
I have 2 intel/dell laptops and thinkpad/amd 14s laptop. Both Dells (a workstation-class 22 core cpu and a more power-efficient one) suck massively when compared to amd ai-something-something-ryzen.
What's worse, intel drivers are a mess on linux right now. Dell xps 13 plus is the worst laptop I had in a decade, and that's after owning every Linux-preinstalled Dell XPS 13 ever released.
What i mean is that it's relatively hard to find an intel laptop that would be meaningfully faster than an amd one. For a while Intel was surviving on quality software but even this moat is drying out.
The Dell Intel-based laptop has an Intel Core i9-13900HX @ 55W TDP. 24 cores, 32 threads, scores 43,067 on passmark. The AMD laptop I got has AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS @ 54W TDP, which scores 28,632 on passmark and I paid about the same price for it as the Dell about one year earlier, around $1200. At the time we bought the Dell, it was faster than comparable AMD based laptops in the same price range, and that was surprising to me too, but that's what happened. Trust me, I searched for the best deal, but the Dell being on sale at the time made it the best choice in terms of speed and features.
FWIW, Apple M4 Max 16 Core scores 43,818 on passmark and runs at 90 Watts TDP, so Intel certainly is competing on speed, as well as TDP.
AMD lost their foundry business on the way. To keep the foundry competitive you need a lot cash rolling in or you're out. Either they become competitive soon, somebody keeps pumping billions in for many years, or they're out and lose their foundry.
Intel as a brand may survive in some shape or form but it's not looking good for the foundry.
