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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

davidoks.blog

611–620 of 682 posts

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those exist, they're just feature phones. Smartphones have to run general purpose apps and that takes RAM.

That was my point, make it so that apps can run on that RAM budget. At least some apps.

The OpenMoko Freerunner only had 128MB RAM, it was able to run a Linux desktop of the time, Englightenment/E16. There were lots of apps for it too. IIRC the cut down QtMoko distro ran best though.

https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_Freerunner https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Applications https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/QtMoko

Before that Linux ran on the Zaurus too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenZaurus

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get the example, any payment in China is basically a duopoly between WeChat and Alipay, meanwhile in US there are visa, mastercard, American Express and discover counting credit card payment only.

In the US, Visa and Mastercard control the backend infrastructure, giving them the power to decide who can use their services. This is why we see them blocking legal platforms or creators simply because a corporate board disagrees with what they are selling. In China, this kind of corporate driven censorship doesn't happen. Tech corporations like WeChat and Alipay don't control the payment routing that is run by the…

Instead, the government does it themselves based on regular politics and moral stances.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antitrust has been dead for decades. It spans administrations and parties.

Under Biden they at least tried

sometimes i wonder if thats big tech pivoted to team red...

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#614
post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article has examples from history of overexpansion and crashes. Would rapidly expanding (or keeping profits lower(??)) be beneficial long term for the Big 3? I bet they think it's better to bank the surplus now. The Chinese will have to get their investment back somehow too after the expansion spend.

Profit is not a concern for the Chinese

[dead]

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#615
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the opposite direction unionpay works at major US retailers directly or at least through a partnership with discover, even Alipay is available at CVS, while us processors presence in China is next to zero.

Alipay is available only through Discover. Chinese processors have no presence in the US. In the same way in China you can use Visa and Mastercard through WeChat.

Source about alipay/discover partnership? I could not find any and it is hard to imagine how a card-based network can support a qrcode-based system. The acceptance of Alipay at CVS/Walgreens is native, meaning you pay by qrcodes, exactly what you do in China.

Major merchants in the US do support UnionPay, even USPS(!) displays its logo. The problem used to be small/local merchants, but with the advent of modern PoS like square/clover it is getting better.

In what same way? Even registering a Wechat account is no trivial task, just look at all those ppl asking help scanning their signup codes. Suppose you did KYC and seasoned the acct enough to get it finally working, it is still limited to business codes (think of bigbox stores), not personal codes (think of farmers market, local mom-and-pop place, etc). The latter actually dominates the daily life in China.

IMO using V/M through wechat/alipay is like in the world you described and I was arguing UnionPay works in the US because ppl can buy gift cards at PO then use them at merchants, which is actually smoother comparing to this w/a business, but at the same time quite ridiculous.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#616
post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to learn more about how they've been sabotaged. What happened?

Google US semiconductor sanctions on China. Basically US (and allies pressed by US) aren't allowed to export their most cutting edge semiconductor tools and materials to China, so China can only make chips using older-gen tools on older process nodes than western-aligned competitors. The other part of the sabotage is that western companies then have restrictions on what chips they're allowed to buy from China. IDK if…

Is any of that relevant to RAM? Half the DRAM is non-EUV and pretty much all DRAM has been stuck on 10nm for the last decade

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you do repeat Marxist tenets, like the class struggle and the labor theory of value.

Just because they are Marxist tenets doesn't mean they aren't true. Feel free to refute them if you feel otherwise.

> Just because they are Marxist tenets doesn't mean they aren't true.

Since Marxism never works, there's something definitely wrong with the tenets.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first computer I ever used had 512K, which was a great deal back then, and by the time I was old enough to learn to type it had 10MB disk too. My childhood best friend and neighbour had the same kind of computer except they only had something like 384K of memory and I tried to convince them their computer was broken when it didn't count up all the way.

> The first computer I ever used had 512K Mine had 4K of RAM and an 800 KHz CPU - and I was living in the future , man. No way I could use that much memory. After all I had to type in whatever program I wanted to run every time I turned it on. Then I got a manual audio cassette recorder and thought "Woah, I don't think it gets better than this!"

My first (vic20) had 3.5KB of ram. When I added a whopping 8KB memory expansion cartridge, I genuinely wondered if I could possibly get any of my BASIC programs to use it all.

And when I upgraded from tapes to the 1541 floppy drive (5.25" floppies), it was like "thats it - I have INFINITE possibilities now"

Simpler times :)

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own FAANG stock because I own the S&P 500 in my retirement accounts, and so do managed pension funds. There's a lot more than billionaires who benefit from FAANG shares going up in value.

Congrats, what about the other 80% of Americans that can barely afford rent and pay for healthcare? Fuck them right? As long as your shares go up, people must die. What a great economic system with great morals that create moral societies.

Increasing FAANG stock prices actually make it harder for me, personally, to afford housing - because I live in the bay area where all the FAANG companies have major offices and when people with lots of FAANG stock get richer, one of the things they spend it on is buying housing in the bay area, bidding up the price of that limited resource for everyone else. Building more housing in the bay area would help with this, but there's a lot of local political pressure not to do that; and this is a bay-area-specific problem because of the physical locations of (most of) the FAANG companies.

Anyway a lot more than 20% of Americans are beneficiaries of some kind of pension or 401k or other source of income that is ultimately funded by the US stock market. And shares of the US stock market going up do not kill people who aren't having part of their income funded primarily by the stock market. People who think this is true and that society is therefore immoral badly misunderstand what the actual problems with producing goods and services for people are, which is the thing that actually matters for human health and flourishing.

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