Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
While that may be tragic, it still is the intentional effect and hardly a mistake. Apple focusing on its $250B iPhone market over its < $50B Mac market very much makes sense. When they removed 32 bit support we might have guessed at Apple Silicon on the desktop, and lo and behold that did come to pass. The Intel to ARM transition was much smoother than the PowerPC to Intel move in part because of 2 vs 4 versions in the Universal Binaries. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that Apple was also aware of ARMs forthcoming complete removal of AArch32.
Comment · 3 years ago
I wouldn't call Apple's decision a mistake, they knew exactly what they were doing and their long term plan required it. The relative insignificant size of user base that still needs 32 bit support is dwarfed by all devices that will never need that. Apple has always been quick to drop backward compatibility to support innovation both at hardware and software. They dropped floppy support and CD/DVD support eons before the rest of the desktop market. Since they own the complete stack at this point and with everything SoC, at some point they will start saving die space not wasted on 32 bit support. To get there however requires they start pushing the software first.
Comment · 3 years ago
> Maybe the software integration helps avoid this?

With auto pilot on the car is watching you. If you take eyes off the road it issues more pay attention nags. Failure to comply removes FSD Beta. So you have a feedback loop where paying attention becomes more important then your phone.

Comment · 3 years ago
Chrome used WebKit until the Blink fork in 2013. That should make the numbers work. :)
Comment · 5 years ago
As the other posts point out it's not just a matter of material, but a trade off. As you increase the ductile strength you end up with something that is more brittle and the same is true in reverse.

Brittle materials are more temperature sensitive and can rapidly fail. Brittle fracture is no joke look for WWII Liberty ships split in two as an example. We didn't really understand why at that point in time.

The answer though is actually pretty simple and why you can't get a perfect material. The lattice structure of the molecules connected to each other can be soft (plastic) or hard (steel).

In the plastic example just take a milk jug and poor boiling water into it. Don't actually do this without protective gear (oven mit should be fine). The molecules holding everything together get excited from the energy (heat) move around and since they are not closely bonded end up in a different configuration. Your milk jug at this point does not look the same and is deformed.

In the hard example just boil the water you are using for the plastic test. The pot you used does not change because the molecules are tightly bonded.

It turns out the the tighter the molecules are bonded there is still a point where that bond will break. Hence the brittle fracture, which is every molecule mic dropping and going home at the same time.

While I could go down another rabbit hole to the atomic, subatomic, level of how those lattice structures work. I won't as I think this example gives you what you need.

Finally in this case we have a very old, by modern space technology, structure that is made of material that was most likely never expected to last this long. If you want a space ship to last you just have to make sure the engineers understand what "last" means. :)

Comment · 5 years ago
And this still happens in Texas where it is suppose to be illegal as well. I called provider multiple times and explained the rate from my insurer. They of course sent to collections, but they know they can't enforce it in court, but that doesn't matter. Most people are just going to pay.

What really got to me was it was ER visit and the Doc(extortionist) spent maybe 5 minutes with me before having the nurse fix me up. After insurance $250 to hospital, and $2000 bill for the Doc.

Comment · 6 years ago
WiFi Teletype that works. I so want that.

Where can I even find a Teletype that might actually be close to working and if do find it can I get a little more notes?

Comment · 6 years ago
RC vs GC really depends on workload/memory and the volatility of the allocate to deallocate timeframe.

I think the better argument here is that iOS and MacOS use RC in the underlying objc libs. Having a CPU that works better around that makes sense to increase performance for those particular OSes.

Comment · 6 years ago
Clock is a up volt and down volt. There is a period of time it takes to reach either up or down.

If I have to get the clock to reach 2 cores/units at the same time that is easier then say 4 cores/units. As you increase the clock speed the time to reach all the cores decreases. So if you are wider you would need to reach more cores/units in the same period of time, hence "harder".

EDIT (To make it a little more clear) To make it more clear the voltage change is typically represented in books as a vertical line, but that is not the case it's diagonal and fuzzy. By fuzzy I mean not a straight line but will have some tiny mini downs on the way up.

Different parts of the circuits are going to respond to the up or the down. They are also can vary based on the exact voltage. For example if I have a 5V up one circuit might consider 4.8V to be up and another could be 4.9 or 4.7.

Silicon has improved, but there still is limits of scale based on size, volts and timing.

Comment · 6 years ago
Except it did by creating a larger market. Some of that was flashy at the start like the gold watches but ultimately created a new market. Personally I quit wearing a watch sometime around 2010 when I found I was checking my phone and didn't need a watch. Now I am checking my watch for time and weather and not pulling my phone out.
Comment · 6 years ago
They did this with FedEx planes out of China years back, forget which iPhone version, but they basically did the same thing they booked everything. All FedEx planes only had iPhones and everybody complained. I don't think they have tried that stunt again.
Comment · 6 years ago
To godelski point yes there is low level stuff that really isn't a concern except to jandrese's point it's political. If I walk out of a reactor room and my gloves from my contamination suit pop too high they get put in a bag that is marked nuclear waste.

Granted the too high mark could still be perfectly fine to throw into a landfill and not impact anything, but nobody wants that in their neighborhood.

As to high level stuff which is what you are asking about, the spent stuff is really hot. To recycle, it would need to cool down first. Commercial plants place that in cooling pools, which is kind of bad if you have a Tsunami hit your plant (Japan), our something else.

So as to the waste element think I have 2% enriched object that is 100 cubic meters. The same in a highly enriched say 90% would only be about 2 cubic meters. This means my pools would be smaller, my overall size is smaller, and I can contain the smaller pool easier preventing the release.

On the politics side the idea of highly enriched is dangerous because it could be used for other purposes, however when those decisions were made I don't think anyone every imagined the concept of a dirty bomb in which enrichment is really going to matter one bit.

Comment · 6 years ago
To be fair those are completely different things. Commercial needs a profit and uses low enriched material. Military is not concerned with profit and uses highly enriched material.

I am not as familiar with the commercial side but I can say the military model is safe as all get out and produces less waste since you only need to refuel ever few decades or so.

Also NRC is very much still involved with Military applications, which at this point just involves moving expensive war ships around.

Comment · 6 years ago
It's not that SV is union workers but that union workers have a higher labor cost. Kind of goes to why GM started Saturn in TN and why Saturn cars where cheap in the late 80s, no unions thus cheaper labor.

SV labor is expensive compared to other markets (see below). I have worked in SV and elsewhere and mostly elsewhere is 1/2 the pay as SV and without the things like free lunch / coffee bar / shuttle service.

SV doesn't need unions because the turnover rate is so high that the companies are basically providing what unions would negotiate just to compete (free lunch / coffee bar / shuttle service). It's still a buyers market from the employee standpoint.

I do think SV is not quite at the inflection point just yet, but it is moving in that direction.

The irony in this is actually that the cost of labor is high because the cost of living is high. The cost of living is high because of the NIMBY folks preventing multiunit housing. If the ballon collapses those NIMBY folks would see their precious house values decline.

Finally as to superior products most Japanese and German cars sold in the US are still built in the US, just not Detroit because of.... Wait for it.... Union Workers.

Comment · 6 years ago
I have thrown out resumes claiming the same. Explain how you have more years experience then the age of the tech. LOLZ.

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