cloudguy

entropys said:

baconstang said:

I love Jane.  
She was so good in so many things.  Especially of late-ish in Newsroom.

She peaked in Barbarella.

Nah, her work for the Viet Cong propaganda machine was some of her best. And since then - doing her level best to deny and ignore that Communist Viet Nam has gone on to be the authoritarian repressive nightmare that pretty much everyone who didn't believe Soviet propaganda knew it would https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/vietnam - was even better because it demonstrated that her ever pretending to care about Viet Nam and its people was all a big act also.

Skeptical said:

lkrupp said:

georgie01 said:

Unsurprising, but also surprising. 5G isn’t even of particular significance right now. I keep 5G off on my iPhone 12 Pro to save battery because there is currently no gain from using 5G.

I know technologies are developed well before they become useful, but I feel like this charade is getting old. LTE never lived up to the potential in the US but they pushed into 5G. And 5G isn’t generally reaching LTE+ potential speeds (except for mmWave). Maybe 6G will live up to the promises of LTE+

5G has been seriously overhyped to the point of ridiculousness. All of the so-called advanced features of 5G are literally years away from being useful. Right now the ONLY feature of 5G being advertised ad nauseam is its supposed speed but that is being called into question too. The main reason carriers have jumped on the bandwagon is that they get to charge more for 5G service and the public buys into it.

And again, today, right now, what advantage is 5G to cellphone users? Not tomorrow, not next year, today. Why should I pay extra for 5G service at this point?

Come live in Finland or Sweden and you’ll see 5G speeds. Cellular in the US is a ripoff. I live in Finland. I pay the equivalent of $25 per month, unlimited everything, no locked in contract or locked phone for the fastest 5G offered. My home internet is 1gig for about $35 a month again unlimited. So for people living elsewhere 5G is living up to its promise. 

It is almost as if Finland has the size and population of a small U.S. state like Alabama instead of 330 million people stretched over 1/3 of a continent or something. I love both apples and oranges but they are not the same.

Nvidia is the best of a bunch of bad options for ARM Holdings. ARM Holdings has a lot of licensees - 500 - but their licensing fees are low. Add that to their significant R&D expenses and ARM Holdings doesn't make much profit. This is why ARM Holdings' shareholders chose to cash out by selling to Softbank for $32 billion in the first place. And it is also why Softbank has been trying to unload ARM Holdings almost ever since, secretly at first but finally openly in a desperate bid to dump them. So whether Softbank spins it off as an IPO or finds another buyer, they wouldn't get anywhere near the $40 billion that Nvidia offered wouldn't even get the $32 billion that they paid for it at this point. Everyone's best scenario - an entity who doesn't have a competing or related product buying ARM to make money off licensing fees without getting involved in the company's operations - doesn't exist. Anyone who buys ARM is going to do so in order to use their IP in their products. Of those, Nvidia is the best bet because Nvidia isn't a major CPU company: the Shield TV streaming box and the Nintendo Switch are the only consumer devices that use them. The combined lifetime sales of those devices are less than the number of Android smartphones and tablets sold by Samsung alone in a good quarter. Nvidia is a GPU company, not a CPU one. They want ARM's AI/ML-related IP for their GPUs, not their Cortex IP for their CPUs. Microsoft, Google and Qualcomm all have CPU-based AI/ML platforms and would rather not see Nvidia's GPU-based one get even better by adding ARM's IP and expertise.

Also, the ARM Holdings Cortex cores IP is going to depreciate in value fast. Their Cortex cores were never a match for x86 in performance. Instead their sole advantage was that until recently x86 couldn't be used in low-power devices (the power/heat thing). But at 7nm and lower, x86 can be while providing much better performance. This means - for example - that x86 Android is finally going to become a thing ... though on edge/IoT/appliance devices that are currently Cortex-based ARM, not on phones and tablets. But x86 Windows and ChromeOS devices that offer comparable performance/battery ratios to the iPad Pro will be on the market with 5nm AMD chips (Athlon architecture) and 10nm Intel chips (big.LITTLE architecture) by 1Q2022. 

And that is just short term. Long term, the real threat to ARM Holdings is RISC-V. RISC-V is open source. Why is this significant? Even though it is very possible to design much better ARM cores "from scratch" like Apple did, because ARM Holdings owns the IP you can use ARM Holdings core designs as a base. But with RISC-V anyone can take the open-source base and use it to create their own truly custom CPUs. Google, Nvidia, Samsung, Western Digital and Marvell are all RISC-V platinum members. There are already RISC-V based IoT devices in the wild and Micro Magic recently created a prototype CPU that doubles the performance of a Samsung Exynos chip. 

So not only is ARM Holdings not making anywhere near enough revenue on licensing to justify a big sale price now, in a few years competition from x86 and RISC-V is going to drive their licensing revenue even lower. Just like Google buying FitBit was better than allowing FitBit to go broke and having who knows buy the FitBit data at bankruptcy auction to do (again) who knows what with it, letting Nvidia buy ARM Holdings today is much better than having Softbank be forced to liquidate it 5 years from now. And the regulators would have far less control over Softbank's liquidating ARM Holdings' IP to cover demonstrable losses than they do approving Softbank's selling ARM Holdings above board.

OctoMonkey said:

No streaming services for me, thank you!

I wonder how much people pay (in total) for their online media.
   Internet cost
+ Cable / Satellite
+ Streaming 1
+ Streaming 2
+ Streaming 3
...

I do not count Amazon Prime as I have been using it for student discounts - my original reason for signing up - and free shipping long before they got into streaming. So ...
Disney Bundle (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+): $18.99
Netflix: $13.99
specialty services: $9.99 and $7.99
Total: $51 a month.

By contrast, cable charges you $40 a month for basic cable. Now I also subscribe to YouTube TV. That jacks up the price to $115 a month. But that is still about the same as the better cable packages.

Caveat: similar to Amazon Prime, the specialty services really don't count. They contain content that I really can't get anywhere else so I would still have them even if I had cable. So truthfully that $115 a month drops to $97. And I am paying for YouTube TV mostly out of laziness/convenience. I could replace it with Plex Live TV or a similar service for as little as $5 a month (plus some hardware). So if I really wanted/needed to save money I would be at $40 a month. 

Also, keep in mind: before they had to compete with cord-cutting cable once cost a lot more. I remember cable bills well over what Comcast, Xfinity and the rest are now charging.

Fidonet127 said:

You can still develop on the Intel Macs.

Not a developer I see. Why do so many people who have never been developers presume to know so much about those who are? (I am a former developer myself by the way.)