Recent content by SIS

Real competition involves more than duopoly. Unfortunately, in tech, duopoly is generally erroneously seen as quality competition. Search. Phones. Operating systems. GPUs. CPUs. Consoles. Et cetera. Cartels are the worst. Monopolies are second. Duopolies are third. None qualify as high-quality...

No. OS X, at least, is full of spy tools and the arsenal is expanding. Windows 10 is merely more open about things because MS gets more scrutiny, less of a blithe assumption of good faith design. Everything is moving in this direction, even open source products like Firefox. Many in the tech...

For those who claim that "US" corporations are hurting or will be hurting if asked to pay living wages, consider these charts. Although they're a little dated, the trends speak for themselves. corporate profits (absolute dollars and economic share) wages as percent of economy massive...

Additionally, there is no guarantee that new vulnerabilities haven't been baked into the new hardware, unintentionally, intentionally, or both. There is a conflict of interest when it comes to secure design. Given that there is a lack of adequate competition (duopoly doesn't really cut it and...

1) It is possible to put in switches that don't do what they're supposed to. This is, in fact, more common than most people recognize. It's also common to not put in switches for everything. Apple products are also absolutely riddled with data theft and the trend is only increasing. For...

The obvious bottom line is that the only way a phone can be trustworthy is if everything in it is fully open source.* Everything. Zero undocumented features. Zero trade secrets. Zero insiders-only. The same, of course, goes for PCs and any other piece of tech. And, it must be designed with a...

Go ahead and ban me for discussing something your article discusses — features like Rapid Packed Math being implemented by developers and how that impacts gaming. GameWorks is very similar to Rapid Packed Math. It is one company's tech vs another's (Rapid Packed Math). Clearly, Nvidia has been...

Fantasyland. Well, of course. If you want people to do as their told (max out their debt, since the job of the masses is to own all of that) then you have to make it so the only things they are allowed to enjoy will keep them in debt. This is why, for instance, American Puritanism has so much...

Cough... GameWorks.... cough. Also... this isn't just about AMD but also about GlobalFoundries, correct? The process that AMD was forced to buy Vega on (due to the wafer agreement and other issues) was optimized for low power, as far as I understand it. It is inferior in performance, at higher...

Mixed information. The recent headlines strongly declare that there is a myopia epidemic caused by screens but I found a 2015 article that says a 20-year study found no link between screentime and myopia. It may be that cell phones, rather than televisions and traditional computers, are to...

Let's cure sex addiction by making sex non-pleasurable for everyone. :) Of course drugs with no side effects are the holy grail of medicine. It's unfortunate that no such drugs exist. Even water will kill a person. So, finding drugs with better therapeutic windows is the real issue...

How about the people who ended up resorting to illegal drugs because they can't get any physician to prescribe effective opioids for extreme pain? Not everyone can afford an ambulance trip every time they have a recurrence of chronic severe pain, nor do most want to suffer the trip there...

I have had very severe back pain and the only thing that allows me to sleep and heal is a strong opioid. Judging by all the press about them I would have felt strong euphoria and become addicted quickly. Instead, when I've been given them I feel a bit nauseous and very sleepy. In terms of...

Let's hope this isn't one of those bait and switch moves, where a company substitutes a lower-spec product for the one that got a good review. This was "Consumer Reports Syndrome", where the top-rated or top-value product would be unavailable by the time the issue was printed. It has been done...

A recent Harvard/Northwestern study determined that 90% of the public is invisible to Congress. It looked at what Congress does legislatively and what the public wants its members to do. They talk enough of the talk to get elected, though. How does the IQ Bell curve fit with this finding? It...