The adversarial relationship of the DRAM user and producer continues Over the full market cycle, each side presses its advantage as much as possible. Historically, the DRAM market has been the most volatile of the major IC product segments. Figure 1 reinforces that statement by showing that the average selling price (ASP) for DRAM has more than doubled in just one year. In fact, the September Update to The McClean Report will discuss IC Insights' forecast that the 2017 price per bit of DRAM will register a greater than 40% jump, its largest annual increase ever! IC Insights (PDF report)

The components are inside the circuit board Through-hole assembly means bending leads on components and putting the leads through holes in the circuit board, then soldering them in place, and trimming the wires. That took up too much space and assembly time and labor, so the next step was surface mount, in which components are placed on top of the circuit board and then solder paste melts and solders the parts together. This made assembly much faster and cheaper and smaller. Hackaday

Build, gather, brawl, repeat: The history of real-time strategy games The rise and fall of real-time strategy games is a strange one. They emerged gradually out of experiments to combine the excitement and speed of action games with the deliberateness and depth of strategy. Then, suddenly, the genre exploded in popularity in the latter half of the 1990s---only to fall from favor (StarCraft aside) just as quickly during the 2000s amid cries of stagnation and a changing games market. Ars Technica

How EVE players pulled off the biggest betrayal in its history EVE Online is infamous for its scammers, pirates, and ne'er-do-wells, but this week all their scams were put to shame. A member of the game's Council of Stellar Management and head diplomat of the Circle of Two alliance named The Judge stole all of the holdings of the 4,000-person alliance for himself. He took their money, took their ships, and sold their Death Star-esque space citadel to their most hated enemies. Kotaku

EFF, ACLU sue over warrantless phone, laptop searches at U.S. border The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today on behalf of 11 travelers whose smartphones and laptops were searched without warrants at the U.S. border. The plaintiffs in the case are 10 U.S. citizens and one lawful permanent resident who hail from seven states... EFF 

Face ID, touch ID, no ID, PINs and pragmatic security I was wondering recently after poring through yet another data breach how many people actually use multi-step verification. I mean here we have a construct where even if the attacker has the victim's credentials, they're rendered useless once challenged for the authenticator code or SMS which is subsequently set. I went out looking for figures and found the following on Dropbox... Troy Hunt

Cliff Bleszinski on LawBreakers: "I have to keep this game alive" Cliff Bleszinski knows the player figures for LawBreakers right now are low. But he isn't losing faith. Games can be slow-burners--just look at Warframeas an example--and developer Boss Key has big plans to get lapsed players to return and bring in new ones. In an interview with GameSpot this week, Bleszinski spoke frankly about LawBreakers. Gamespot

How to live without Google Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites. This means they are not only tracking what you search for, they're also tracking which websites you visit, and using all your data for ads that follow you around the internet. Your personal data can also be subpoenaed by lawyers, including for civil cases like divorce. Google answered over 100,000 such data requests in 2016 alone! DuckDuckGo

The father of mobile computing is not impressed "You want to see some old media?" Alan Kay grins beneath his gray mustache and leads me through his Brentwood home. It's a nice place with a tennis court out back, but given the upper-crust Los Angeles neighborhood it sits in, it's hardly ostentatious. He shares it with his wife, Bonnie MacBird, the author and actress who penned the original script for Tron. Fast Company

Space heater concept reinvented: Qarnot's house warming computing ft. Intel, AMD In a move that is sure to bring the cozy, homely warm feeling back towards the space heater concept of yore - who doesn't remember AMD's mocking videos of NVIDIA's Fermi architecture - french company Qarnot has announced their third-generation iteration of a product which is sure to change the Kelvin and Celsius degrees in the computing space. Techpowerup

99 noteworthy games still coming to PC in 2017 Earlier this week, we set out to catalog every PC game coming out before the end of this year, from Fruit Golf to What!? My Neighbors Are Demons!!?, but there are so many games our fingers started going numb. That said, we've taken a pretty good crack at it, collecting 99 games that are all scheduled to release before the new year (plus a few just released games that we slipped in anyway). PC Gamer

Doublefine's Tim Schafer: Does your dream job have to cost your personal life? Tim Schafer was only 22 when he walked through the doors of Skywalker Ranch to start his new job at George Lucas's thriving video games division. Fresh out of college and with a computer science degree, he couldn't believe his luck --- being paid to make video games at the headquarters of the Star Wars empire, 30 miles north of San Francisco. Medium

One design, two products: The SanDisk Ultra 3D (1TB) and WD Blue 3D (1TB) SSD Reviews, with BiCS 3D NAND Western Digital, and its subsidiary SanDisk, have had some of the best performing planar TLC SATA SSD components in recent memory, so the bar is high for a new generation of SSDs. This review covers two drives which have the same design but differ in name only: the SanDisk Ultra 3D 1TB, and the Western Digital WD Blue 3D 1TB. AnandTech

A solid-state fridge in your pocket Can you imagine an electric cooler compact enough to fit in your pocket and flexible enough to wear? If not, think again because engineers at the University of California at Los Angeles and SRI International have one working: A 5-millimeter-thick device that is the world's first solid-state cooler combining practicality, energy efficiency, and high performance. IEEE Spectrum

Steam crosses 15 million concurrent users for the first time ever Valve's popular gaming platform, Steam, has reached an important milestone in its 14 years of existence by hosting 15 million concurrent users for the first time ever. If that wasn't enough, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds crossed an unprecedented 1.3 million concurrent users- the highest ever on Steam. Neowin

Initial benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 7601 on Ubuntu Linux Last week we received the AMD EPYC 7601 32 core / 64 thread processor for testing at Phoronix with the Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026 2U server. Since then I've had the pleasure of putting this Zen server processor through its paces. I am still early in the testing process with many more interesting benchmarks to come, but today are some initial numbers of the AMD EPYC 7601 compared to various Intel Xeon CPUs while running Ubuntu Linux. Phoronix

Why Microsoft will drive serious Linux innovation Is Microsoft "the only [company] doing serious innovating with Linux?" That's Jessie Frazelle's contention. Frazelle, who rose to prominence in the developer community with Docker and later Google Cloud, made the bold claim to justify her departure to Microsoft. On its face it seems silly, an over-exuberant claim to justify a career move. InfoWorld

After Equifax, what will credit or identity monitoring really do for you? On the heels of the major security breach at Equifax, millions of Americans are considering signing up for identity and credit monitoring. Equifax is even offering its own version, called TrustedID Premier, for free to all U.S. consumers for a year. IEEE Spectrum

"Peel-and-go" printable structures fold themselves As 3-D printing has become a mainstream technology, industry and academic researchers have been investigating printable structures that will fold themselves into useful three-dimensional shapes when heated or immersed in water. MIT

Brain-machine interface isn't sci-fi anymore Thomas Reardon puts a terrycloth stretch band with microchips and electrodes woven into the fabric---a steampunk version of jewelry---on each of his forearms. "This demo is a mind fuck," says Reardon, who prefers to be called by his surname only. He sits down at a computer keyboard, fires up his monitor, and begins typing. Wired (separately, Biomedical engineers connecting a human brain to the internet in real time)

How to navigate the coming A.I. hypestorm Here's what you need to know about every way-cool and-or way-creepy machine learning study that has ever been or will ever be published: Anything that can be represented in some fashion by patterns within data --- any abstract-able thing that exists in the objective world, from online restaurant reviews to geopolitics --- can be "predicted" by machine learning models given sufficient historical data. The Outline