DRAM is a commodity in both the actual sense (the stuff from different sources is pretty much interchangeable) and the sense you've described. You, literally you, can ring up someone who runs a contract fab and ask them to make you some DRAM. It's pretty straightfoward stuff. Here's a YouTuber making some in his garage: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F....

There are a bunch of boutique DRAM producers. They're small scale and do specialty stuff (the actual high end DRAM). The commodity stuff you want to buy is dominated by a few companies that are vertically integrated, super efficient and make their money on massive volume. They also switch around a fair bit because during booms like this one making memory seems like a great idea, but then there's a bust and half of them go broke. SK Hynix alone started out as Hyundai, merged with LG's memory unit, got booted out of Hyundai during a bust, got bought by a conglomerate, bought out Intel's memory unit, and is currently a major producer.

But hey, it's boom time so Intel's talking about making memory again, CXMT is firing up and the majors are all building new fabs as quickly as they can borrow the money to pay for them.

A general named Randy George would normally be a good influence in Hegseth's army but the guy wanted to know why Apache helicopters were buzzing Kid Rock's swimming pool, and you just can't tolerate that kind of killjoy.

The value I see in Xbox:

1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.

Frankly? I see 2 options.

AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.

It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).

Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.

Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.

I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).

There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.

I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.

(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)

Yeah, but why not? You're clearly not doing anything with the property. Might as well let someone get good use out of it.

Microsoft seems intent on destroying every one of their valuable properties with enshitification, trying to pull the last dollar out of existing products instead of innovating or providing anything for their customers.

As for Xbox being a loss leader... what are they smoking? The boxes themselves have been for a long time, that's just game industry economics. They've already divested from that, pushing the hardware cost onto manufacturers, which is sure to make the platform price go up. But the software side of that business? It's always been incredibly lucrative.

What have MS done, lately? The only things that come to mind are increased "vertical integration", pushing their customers to the cloud while at the same time increasing the licensing costs and decreasing the quality and usability of all of their self-hosted products. Managing Windows has become increasingly difficult, and once useful tools don't even work. The tools that do work, Powershell, usually don't even work, with constant drift across products as to what works and what doesn't.

There are further cultural observations to make specifically related to Xbox, but I'm sure that would get some people in a tizzy.

burn down institutions that actually work; they are too stupid to understand how they work.

Khrushchev would love that our government is full of people who disagree with the principle of Chesterton's Fence. It's appalling that "conservatives" have become so far to the left of "The Left."

Vote conservative: vote Democrat.

He had his own RSS reader app back in the day (and used to post here a lot)

Hopefully I can keep using old.reddit.com because I HATE the new interface. I want the content... not the flowery layout and noise that neo-Reddit thinks makes them money.

It isn't sociopaths which makes a product good, it's engineering.

France specifically, and Europe more generally, lacks the economic incentives to keep the best and brightest employed at frontier level work. The European "IT industry" is all but dead.

No, that clearly isn't what Jesus meant, and it's made excruciatingly clear that faith without action is dead. Heart condition -> action -> salvation. You can't omit a step.

That's interesting, because I've seen the exact opposite play out twice in our small local schools. There's a "measles outbreak", and they rush to blame the unvaccinated, but it's only vaccinated kids who end up getting sick.

You think it's unreasonable that nighttime brightness has doubled (actually 1.5x) over the last ten years?

Modern Slashdot. Technical details? How dare you include details! Stupid nerd!

The system scanned 500,000 faces. It cost £320,000.

Hacks the DOJ.

Dot: I'm finished! Here you are! Aren't I a good dot?

AC: Holy fuck, how'd you do that?

FBI kicks down door.

both sides.

Found your problem.