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.

That, and I've seen hundreds of notebooks, I've maybe seen two that were thick enough that I would consider it unreasonable from a usability standpoint. My second notebook I got in grade 12, 21(ish) years ago, even then, it wasn't so thick I'd consider it a dealbreaker. I would fairly say in 20 years there hasn't been a thickness issue, in general. I honestly can't think of a reason to intentionally picker thinner, can anyone?

The only reason to go thinner is a status, which you really do see. I have two girls in high-school, and image / status is everything. Literally, pulling out a wafer thin MacBook is cred, and pulling out a Clevo, is “ewww, look at that poor kid.” (say that in Jackies voice from That 70s show). I have three notebooks in my office, all different thicknesses, all “thick” by HP / Neo standards, and I have never given it consideration as to quality, usability, or functionality.

Microsoft is known as a company that develops low quality, broken, breaking, unstable, insecure, unusable crap. Microsoft can't tarnish anything, to achieve that it would have to be untarnished to start, and when has Microsoft developed something that anyone would consider even an aluminum foil standard? If you use the typical levels of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Aluminum, Microsoft products start somewhere around: “Tarnished aluminum, left over from last night's roast, thrown in a sink, with food scrap, dirty diapers, fecal matter, which is set on fire.”. That's a pretty fair, I'd say kind, assessment of what Microsoft produces, case in point, Outlook can't process S/MIME emails, it will throw an error. Windows is so shitty, they had to build Linux containers and VMs on top of it, so you could use the thing.

Yep, and importantly Microsoft is admitting their attempt at an OS has failed, objectively. Windows has no place in the professional world apart from small edge cases, which are rare. What Microsoft should do is convert their OS into a user land you can run on top of Linux. Then you could natively leverage the existing tooling that is world-class, and rock solid, then play with the shards of broken glass, for people really into digital S&M.

Sadly, it often is faster to do that than work within the old bureaucracy and its entrenched people, rules, and regulations.

This is pretty much a textbook case of a stopped clock being right twice a day.

Notwithstanding Hegseth's absymal record prior to and within the Department of Defense/War/Being Tough, the war in Ukraine has showed how different war can be run than the way our military is currently organized.

Even if if you don't buy the army having "Transformers" type robots punching each other out (and I don't), it's clear that there is going to be a lot of "AI"-ish and highly automated stuff fighting wars. There needs to be a unit devoted to understanding FPV drones on land, sea, and air, plus all of the infrastructure for using them, defending against them, the communications to run them, training people to manage these kinds of weapons and units.

Yep, apparently for all the handwaving and empty statements, systems are not secure, even accidentally. I don't blame Trump, most systems aren't secured properly, and aren't reviewed for security in any meaningful manner. The real issue is legacy, everything is built on the broken and lacking cores and bones, and patches of decades of old systems and platforms. Modern systems are like 40-year-old drywall, a lot of patches holes, and multiple coats of paint, without being replaced, and that's why you can't tackle security. At some point, we need to rip it all out, and start with security by default, from the start, and then you can start to trust the system.

Does thickness matter to anyone really? I could understand if the notebook was 90s thick, or late 80s thick, to the point it's a briefcase, but, except for edge case notebooks, do they really get so thick it's an issue? I think thinness needs to stop being a selling point.

8 GB of ram is not enough, even if you paired it with a good discrete GPU, with its memory, it's still not enough. I understand memory is expensive, and irrationally so, but you really need at least 16 GB, and really you need 32 GB as a starting configuration. If I set up a bare-bones OpenBSD, FreeBSD, or Linux install, I'd max that 8 GB with little effort. Windows 11 can't run on 8 GB, it might be listed as supported or a minimum configuration, but honestly, you can't run it on 8 GB of memory.

The editors don't edit or care enough to listen. The owners don't care either, despite the old Slashdot having vastly more users.

Being "Slashdotted" by users flocking to mentioned sites went away along with Slashdot influence.

They'll likely sell tons of them to users who don't need more than what those specs deliver. In ancient times netbooks sold well despite weak specs.

No electronic records are "safe", unless air-gapped.

It's not practical to have widely used systems and completely effective security. Humans and computers are inherently fallible.

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!