Love that feature - use it a few times.

Great to convert it as huge 15 inch, 1080p, 16GB RAM tablet and browse the web/amazon with a few people together. 16GB makes is much better browser experience than ipad and most of the android. The con is that it does weight a lot more than regular tablet.

Flash connection protocols (sata, ide) allows much faster evolution independent what's on the other side of interface.

If you have a new flash tech that's 2,3x better in density/speed, you can easily deploy it in current generation of high end server in the next few months.

RAM protocols (DDR2,3,4) must be developed 100% in sync with the CPU vendors. If the major cpu vendors (Intel, AMD, ARM Soc, Qualcomm) decide they don't want your new 2,3x better interface speed/density, you have zero chance to deploy it. It takes years for JEDEC to agree on new memory interface standard. Your new 2,5,10x better tech's deployment is actually depend on your competitors agree to allow it to be the new standard.

Flash can have higher latency as trade off if needed. DDR interface's latency has high impact on the CPU/system benchmark.

For flash storage, the hierarchy looks like this:

CPU -> standardized interface (PCIe, SATA) -> Controller Chip -> NAND

For DRAM, it looks like this: CPU -> DRAM

The DRAM controller is (these days[0]) built directly into the CPU, whereas for flash storage, the NAND controller communicates with the CPU (indirectly) over a standardized interface. So for flash storage, the designers have control over which controller chip they use, and as such can change the NAND technology used at will. They aren't even limited to NAND, if something better comes along. Whereas with RAM, you can't just plug DDR4 into a CPU that only "speaks" DDR3. I think that flexibility is the important distinction.

[0] It used to be that the DRAM controller was on the northbridge, which was a separate chip from the CPU. But for the purposes of performance and power consumption, the tradeoff with flexibility was made (The Athlon 64 was the first [consumer?] CPU to put the memory controller directly on-die, and that was a large part of the reason it crushed the Pentium 4.)

Or they are required to release those device's source code to (and pay for) the "communities" for the maintain the security updates.

If they don't do it, they are responsible to damage caused by those devices because of security issue or the customer's loss of data/privacy due to hacking by 3rd parties.

Similar to recent case where "food processor" company is liable if the blade is cracked into pieces into the processed food after a few years.

For the past 10 years, I have been working for an ARM SOC company in US. More and more I see zero margin in ARM SOC especially - with $5-15 4 core 32, 64 bits ARM soc in the market.

For Pi-zero, it is $5 for PCB with 512MB of RAM.

There are no $ to be made in SOC HW and board. If there is any margin left, small ARM SOC vendors from China/Taiwan will quickly take them over and make sure nothing is left for US companies.

For these reasons, I don't see anyone can make $ from making any HW SOC/board in US with ARM nor RISC-V type ISV.

Hope that will be true soon.

Spend a few weeks/months work on that. Publish it on github, show it on HN, ask for feedbacks, improve it and put that/them on your resume.

I absolutely hate the constant force update/reboot from Win10 and the huge amount background / network activities/connections.

After most of the win10 background networks connections are blocked and force update/reboot is disabled with Windows firewall, the system are usable now.

I tried and found the new Linux subsystem not useful at all. Real Linux inside virtualbox worked much better for my own use.

Searching the net with firefox/google is much faster than Cortana. I found and installed the 8 year old discontinued "Google Desktop Search" Windows App and it can search files in my location system with 100 times better results and so much faster than latest Cortana/SearchUI.

VSCode is very good.

Visual Studio 2015 is just huge complex monster. Took hours to download and install. I tried download a few popular opensource packages (Python, winscp, ... etc) and used VS2015 community edition to build - all failed to build for one reason or another.

Really? How often? I have "active hours" set and I rarely get more than one reboot per month. Same with network connections, and what they're doing. Some recorded facts would be more interesting than your impressions...

MS really needs to get their shit together especially on the laptops.

Our laptops are not having problems but they are in regular use...

  [dozzie@alojzy dozzie]$ uptime
   02:29:42 up 53 days, 11:03,  2 users,  load average: 0.11, 0.19, 0.18

  [dozzie@wolfram dozzie]$ uptime 
   02:29:49 up 9 days, 14:20,  1 user,  load average: 0.25, 0.24, 0.26

I block all those apps now with Windows firewall except firefox, chrome and Windows defender.

Also you can check out the default windows firewall config and see how many out going connections are allowed AND CONNECTED by default.

I always configure my system network security by default disable ALL and only selected app/ports are allow connect to internet.

Win10 firewall is completely opposite - its default configure for outgoing are "Allow ALL".

The start menu is supper fast and search is actually usable for me now.