Well, if that page is accurate, it paints a depressing picture for the competition.
The CPUs listed in those laptops? Either the same or a slower version of the processors used in the Macbook. You know, that fanless 12 inch Intel thing which everyone complained about because it was too slow (and the keyboard was the worst butterfly one ever made, but.)
Taken with the grain of salt as they ought to be, the Geekbench score for the M1 Air is 2.3 times higher single-core, 4.9 times higher multi-core than the most expensive MacBook with a i7-7Y75, one of the "Kaby Lake Core Y"s in that list.
The only newer processor there is from 8th gen Amber Lake, which seems to be the only newer "fanless" CPU from Intel.
(the 9th gen "Y" designs were, apparently, only ever used in the (fan-including) 2020 macbook air)
Bitcoin has proven to be a poor "medium of exchange", but that is OK because buying and selling Bitcoin is easy enough for it to be a practical place in which to park money. I.e., it has proven to be a satisfactory "store of value".
Gold is a poor medium of exchange, too, but that has not prevented it from being a satisfactory store of value.
(Yes, I know that gold actually was a common medium of exchange at one time; it was displaced centuries ago by the greater convenience of paper money.)
Some visionary types hoped Bitcoin would disrupt government-issued (paper) money and governments and banks generally. The fact that these hopes were dashed does not mean Bitcoin will not remain an OK place to park money.
Out of all the coins, Bitcoin has the longest history of being an OK place to park money. History is probably the largest factor in people's decisions about which coin to park their money in. The fact that other coins solve various technical problems will continue to be a small factor as long as Bitcoin continues to avoid running into a disastrous technical problem.
I found it interesting that Wallace didn't start out racist: he became racist when he discovered it would help him win elections. Before that he was a liberal.
US nuclear-war planners in the 1970s or 1980s estimated that there was enough food in silos in the US to feed the survivors for about 3 years. I think they assumed that 50% or 60% of Americans would survive. Usually, most of the grains and beans in those silos would go to feeding livestock, but in an emergency they could be used to keep people alive instead.
So, unless the livestock-feed supply chain has tightened up significantly since the 1970s or 1980s, the US would have about 3 years to get mechanized agriculture back up and running.
Also, ISTR that they estimated that most cars and trucks will survive the attack, but since the electrical systems of automobiles have changed drastically since the 1980s, maybe the US's current inventory of automobiles is a lot more sensitive to electromagnetic pulses. (Cars and trucks are relevant because the US would need some way to transport the grain and beans in silos, most of which are on farms or near farms, to where the people are.)
>So, unless the livestock-feed supply chain has tightened up significantly since the 1970s or 1980s, the US would have about 3 years to get mechanized agriculture back up and running.
How would they process into human-usable formats and get it distributed in time in the initial period after the nuclear exchange? Beans are easy, but I would imagine a large proportion of people don't even own a mortar and pestle or other means of improvising a flour mill.
It is certainly possible to improvise one, but access to information would also be disrupted immediately after a nuclear war so they couldn't just fire up youtube and watch one of these Primitive Technology videos on how to make a mill. We have forgotten the old ways and I fear many people would simply not be able to cope in a harsher environment without modern conveniences and comforts.
I'm not concerned about food shortages causing human extinction as such. Supermarkets with just-in-time logistics leave no buffer room while the feed is processed, but humans can survive 10's of days or longer without food (as long as they're hydrated, with some variability for body weight, access to vitamin supplements, and so on) and outside of major population centres (which are probably craters by this stage) you'd imagine a good part of the population have decent food stockpiles, and at least some farms would hopefully not be too affected by fallout and could continue producing enough food for at least a small village's worth of people. IIRC you need ~150 genetically healthy breeding pairs of humans to have enough diversity (assuming careful management to avoid inbreeding and so on) to viably repopulate the earth, which should be reasonable - although getting them all into one place might be harder.
Rather, I worry food riots and the associated issues such as blocked roads, torched buildings, looting, and so on could push a civilisation that is already severely damaged over the edge into total collapse.
Good point about the need to process the grains and beans. Here is the author of Nuclear War Survival Skills on the subject:
>Whole-kernel grains or soybeans cannot be eaten in sufficient quantities to maintain vigor and health if merely boiled or parched. A little boiled whole-kernel wheat is a pleasantly chewy breakfast cereal, but experimenters at Oak Ridge got sore tongues and very loose bowels when they tried to eat enough boiled whole-kernel wheat to supply even half of their daily energy needs. Even the most primitive peoples grind or pound grains into a meal or paste before cooking. (Rice is the only important exception.) Few Americans know how to process whole-kernel grains and soybeans (our largest food reserves) into meal. This ignorance could be fatal to survivors of a nuclear attack. Making an expedient metate, the hollowed-out grinding stone of Mexican Indians, proved impractical under simulated post-attack conditions. Pounding grain into meal with a rock or a capped, solid-ended piece of pipe is extremely slow work. The best expedient means developed and field-tested for pounding grain or beans into meal and flour is an improvised 3-pipe grain mill. Instructions for making and using this effective grain-pounding device follow. . . . As soon as fallout decay permits travel, the grain-grinding machines on tens of thousands of hog and cattle farms should be used for milling grain for survivors. It is vitally important to national recovery and individual survival to get back as soon as possible to labor-saving, mechanized ways of doing essential work. In an ORNL experiment, a farmer used a John Deere Grinder-Mixer powered by a 100-hp tractor to grind large samples of wheat and barley. When it is used to grind rather coarse meal for hogs, this machine is rated at 12 tons per hour. Set to grind a finer meal-flour mixture for human consumption, it ground both hard wheat and feed barley at a rate of about 9 tons per hour. This is 2400 times as fast as using muscle power to operate even the best expedient grain mill.
Food rotted in fields this year because the supply chain wasn't even agile enough to switch from supplying restaurants to supermarkets. Given actual disaster, distribution would be even harder because people would definitely attempt to hoard food.
Taking power consumption into account makes sense when the machine is running on battery power, but all modern processors are power efficient enough for the cost of electricity to be negligible for a tiny desktop computer.
I agree for the most part; the exception would be if I were running the small machine as a server. I know this is outside of most use cases, but if I were buying a machine to have on all the time (Plex, email, whatever), I'd want to at least feel like it's not driving up my electric bill.
This is where idle power matters. I recently replaced a pretty low power atom in my nas with a i3-9100F. The peak power usage is probably a good 2x higher, but the idle power is just a couple watts, so I expect my average power draw to be much less since the power draw under plex/etc is about the same and the machine sits idle most of the time.
Hypothetical scenario: You save 50W (maybe too high, maybe not), use the machine for 10h every day, and a kWh costs you €0.40 (eg in Germany). You save €0.20 per day, €73 per year, and €365 in 5 years. Definitely a factor in areas with high electricity prices.
I think for most power users, they probably generate significantly more than €73 in value from the computer every day (or maybe every hour), so they are probably not thinking too much about that savings.
(Of course, power savings are important in their own right for mobile / battery-operated use cases.)
>no companies actually decline these acquisitions.
Not true. Yahoo made 2 separate offers to acquire Google, and an established social-media company offered to acquire Facebook (for a billion dollars IIRC).
I read somewhere about 15 years ago that the term was introduced when laptops would get so hot that the legal departments at laptop vendors started to worry about their liability if they kept calling them laptops and they got sued by someone whose lap got burned.
Now that Apple's laptops run much cooler, my guess is that they continue to say "notebook" because Apple owns an important trademark that ends in "Book".
https://www.ultrabookreview.com/6520-fanless-ultrabooks/