Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 21364 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
Don't worry it's nearly summer and of course covid is over. We really deserve a good holiday and the economy (or at least the stock market) is picking up and we can all fly without masks or tests - so we should splurge on a couple of weeks in that "exotic" destination ( in one of those poor countries with a 10% vaccination rate)
So we should get a chance to learn a couple of new Greek letters soon
Averages don't tell the whole story.
There is a lot of difference between a developer at a silicon valley FAANG / Wall St bank and doing reports at a supermarket in Arkansas
The industry is also very steeply curved. There are a lot of new graduates, fewer higher paid 5year staff, much fewer very well paid 10 year developers and a very few very very well paid 20+ year experts
If you are a crappy food outlet / Arkansas based superstore and you get 100,000 applications from people with no qualifications and you are just trying to filter those that can read = this makes sense
If you are a global technology company paying a head-hunter for a world class subject expert, perhaps modify the process ?
Thank you for sending in your CV, please transcribe each of the sections into our web form (which will fail to work due to faulty verification
Why yes we are a major software company with a mission statement of making the world's information available
No we can't transfer the data ourselves
She was juts lucky that it was never needed -
We shared an office with a company that did a "phone in before visit - phone back after" system for district nurses, after that estate agent got murdered by a client she was showing a house to.
There is a system in the USA where an electric locomotive moves a train of concrete blocks up a mountain, then rolls them back down again with regen braking.
Not as efficient as batteries, but if you happen to have a mountain with a spare railway line up it.
That's the normal problem with these schemes.
Unless you are doing it for pure green-washing it massively increases the cost. You have to build the worst case cooling plant, to handle the full load in the hottest summer AND the infrastructure to move a lot of low grade heat to the community in winter.
You also have the maintenance problem that each of these systems is shut down for half the time.
For all the theranos scam it makes sense for a lot of medical tests. For nondestructive measurements (where you aren't adding a reagent) it's crazy to take blood measure a parameter, throw it away, go to another clinic, take more blood to measure another parameter - just because it's a different insurance billing code.
The paper says they have used 'the type of sensors' used in phone lidar, not that they have used your iPhone.
Then it gets spun by the university publicity office, and the conference organizers, and the journal - to get clicks = further funding.
We now use banks of semiconductor lasers in industrial applications but that's a long way from 'DVD players slice through steel'
> You get paid for your work, not for being logged on.
That's even a problem with our (government run) ambulance service.
The staff are paid very little for being on-call and then a decent wage for call outs.
In the city this means $$$$ but out here in our rural idyll there are very few calls, so staff can't afford to take the job, so we end up with a long ambulance trip from the city or expensive helicopter.
A good test then might be does Uber decide where it will accept drivers ?
If I'm in some barbarian part of Scotland where there are almost no customers then if I'm really a contractor then that's my problem but if Uber say that they won't accept me as a driver because there are no fares then they sound a lot like an employer.
Because Uber (claim) they are offering a service where drivers can choose to take jobs and get (relatively) well paid while they're driving.
Do Uber have to pay minimum wage for anybody who says they are available for a drive, even if there are no customers? Does this mean that if I sign up for Uber and never actually drive I should still get paid minimum wage?
How does this affect other industries. If I'm a theatrical agent do I have to pay my clients minimum wage if they are 'resting' ?
>Is time considered a Federal matter or not ??
It was upto individual towns, so especially in the south either for obvious reasons that they are in a sunny desert near the tropics, or because it isn't in the bible.
There was a recent law saying that any further changes had to be agreed by the feds, tied to bridge maintenance funding or similar chicanery.
The government probably cannot mandate this change, but it can force all federal government bodies to use it and potentially anybody getting money from the feds.
>DST is an abomination. As the sun approaches the apex, it is noon.
We could do away with timezones altogether.
We don't have watches anymore, we look at our phones for the time. Phones have GPS and so know their exact longitude. Obviously we should all have our own local solar time.
The only reason for standard time was railway timetables. The USA has almost abolished trains and has certainly freed itself from the tyranny of the rigid train timetable. Why not abandon this big-government standard time ? Freedum !
>So why when you ask the weight of the Saturn V rocket, do you always get an answer in pounds?!
We have 1st stage separation at a vehicle mass of 100 tonnes, 4 hundredweight, 6 stone 3 lb and an altitude of 100 nautical miles, 4 furlongs, 6 chains, 3 yards, 2feet
Simple really
>They occasionally talk about having a single European (including UK) timezone
It was tried but there was significant anti-europe feeling in the UK at the time and so the attempt to extend it to the UK was abandoned. in favour of trying to extend it to the east.
These custom runs are actually more useful at 'obsolete' process sizes.
A lot of them are power chips, some RF with novel antennae design - which need big gates.
Even big fabs (like TSMC) are reasonably cheap/accomodating for getting prototype quantities made on these processes. And the design tools are cheap(ish) and well known
If you need custom 5nm chip then A) you are going to need multiple years of process development work with TSMC before you can even think of taping out a sample, and B) you can probably just wait for a regular fast CPU/SOC to come out and do it in software.
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