Seems like the strategy should be to open up a diagonal with the original queen and just launch as many queens as quickly as possible into the field

soldered RAM across the board

More than soldering, it's actually packaged, physically placed into the same single black package as the CPU and GPU and storage, and then that whole single package is soldered to the board.

Lots and lots of people went on the 98 to XP to 7 to 10 path, skipping Me, Vista, and 8. No reason that pattern can't continue.

So I used THIS GUIDE to try to make a persistant USB stick.

Yeah you're gonna want to use an external SSD instead. USB thumb drives can vary considerably in speed, and bottlenecking yourself there is gonna be a miserable experience.

Intel's packaging doesn't seem to be that far behind TSMC's, just with different strengths and weaknesses, at least on the foundry side. On the design side they were slow to actually implement chiplet based design in the actual chips, compared to AMD who embraced it full force early on, and Apple who rely almost exclusively on System-in-a-Package designs (including their "ultra" line of M-series chips that are two massive Max chips stitched together) where memory and storage are all in one package.

So what IS their strategy now?

I think they need to bet the company on regaining their previous lead in actual cutting edge fabrication of semiconductors.

TSMC basically prints money, but the next stage is a new paradigm where TSMC doesn't necessarily have a built-in advantage. Samsung and Intel are gunning for that top spot with their own technologies in actually manufacturing and packaging chips, hoping to leapfrog TSMC as the industry tries to scale up mass production of chips using backside power and gate all around FETs (GAAFETs).

If Intel 18A doesn't succeed, the company is done.

Foxconn had two groups of engineers leave and create Intel and AMD when they were dissatisfied with how management was running the company.

You're thinking of Fairchild, not Foxconn.

William Shockley led the team that invented the transistor while at Bell Labs, and then went on to move back to his home state of California to found his own company developing silicon transistors, ultimately resulting in the geographical area becoming known as Silicon Valley. Although a brilliant scientist and engineer, he was an abrasive manager, so 8 of his key researchers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor, a division of a camera and imaging company with close ties to military contracting.

The researchers at Fairchild developed the silicon integrated circuit (Texas Instruments developed the first integrated circuit with germanium, but it turns out that semiconductor material wasn't good for scaling and hit a dead end early on), and grew the company into a powerhouse. Infighting between engineers and management (especially east coast based management dictating what the west coast lab was doing) and Fairchild's policy of not sharing equity with employees, led Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (who had been 2 of the 8 who left Shockley for Fairchild) to go and found Intel, poaching a talented young engineer named Andy Grove.

Intel originally focused on memory, but Grove recognized that the future value would be in processors, so they bet the company on that transition to logic chips, just in time for the computer memory market to get commoditized and for Japanese competition to crush the profit margins in that sector. By the 90's, Intel became known as the dominant company in CPUs. Intel survived more than one generation on top because they knew when to pivot.

They had untouchable market dominance from the mid 80's through the mid 2010's, so probably closer to 30 years.

AMD and Apple caught up on consumer PC processors, as the consumer PC market as a whole kinda started to fall behind tablets and phones as the preferred method of computing. Even in the data center, the importance of the CPU has lost ground to GPU and AI chips in the past 5 years, too. We'll see how Intel protects its current position in the data center.

I'm personally excited about the actual engineering challenges that come next and think that all 3 big foundries have roughly equal probability of coming out on top in the next stage, as the transistors become more complex three dimensional structures, and as the companies try to deliver power from the back side of the wafer rather than the crowded front side.

Samsung and Intel have always struggled with manufacturing finFETs with the yields/performance of TSMC. Intel's struggles to move on from 14nm led to some fun memes, but also reflected the fact that they hit a plateau they couldn't get around. Samsung and Intel have been eager to get off of the finFET paradigm and tried to jump early to Gate All Around FETs (GAAFETs, which Samsung calls MBCFET and Intel calls RibbonFET), while TSMC sticks around on finFET for another generation.

Samsung switched to GAAFET for its 3nm node, which began production in 2022, but the reports are that it took a while to get yields up to an acceptable level. Intel introduced GAAFET in its 20A node, but basically abandoned it before commercial production and put all of its resources into 18A, which they last reported should be ready for mass production in the first half of 2025 and will be ready for external customers to start taping out their own designs.

Meanwhile, TSMC's 3nm node is still all finFET. Basically the end of the line for this technology that catapulted TSMC way ahead of its peers. Its 2nm node will be the first TSMC node to use GAAFET, and they have quietly abandoned plans to introduce backside power in the generation after that, for their N2P. Their 1.6 nm node is going to have backside power, though. They'll be the last to marker with these two technologies, but maybe they're going to release a more polished process that still produces better results.

So you have the three competitors, with Samsung being the first to market, Intel likely being second, and TSMC being third, but with no guarantees that they'll all solve the next generation challenges in the same amount of lead time. It's a new season, and although past success does show some advantages and disadvantages that may still be there, none of it is a guarantee that the leader right now will remain a leader into the next few generations.

How do you wake a Mac Mini? Is it enough to just press a keyboard button? If so, does the keyboard have to be wired, or does Bluetooth work?

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here's a list of major legislation.

• Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
• The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
• The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
• Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
• School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
• Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
• Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That's a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn't include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

Our heads are just loaded with sensory capabilities that are more than just the two eyes. Our proprioception, balance, and mental mapping allows us to move our heads around and take in visual data from almost any direction at a glance, and then internally model that three dimensional space as the universe around us. Meanwhile, our ears can process direction finding for sounds and synthesize that information with our visual processing.

Meanwhile, the tactile feedback of the steering wheel, vibration of the actual car (felt by the body and heard by the ears), give us plenty of sensory information for understanding our speed, acceleration, and the mechanical condition of the car. The squeal of tires, the screech of brakes, and the indicators on our dash are all part of the information we use to understand how we're driving.

Much of it is trained through experience. But the fact is, I can tell when I have a flat tire or when I'm hydroplaning even if I can't see the tires. I can feel inclines or declines that affect my speed or lateral movement even when there aren't easy visual indicators, like at night.