Posts by Greg 38 61 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2011
don't forget the systemd religious denominations
"Whilst Linux users are insulting themselves on their internet forums because they're fighting one another over KDE versus GNOME, and who's desktop customization is best, the rest of us just get to work, do what caused us to be in front of a computer in the first place, and move on with our lives."
These guys have earned their time in prison, no doubt. However, I'd bet the prosecution and investigation cost the taxpayers much more than the $1.3M amount swindled by their criminal acts in the first place. Aren't there bigger fish to fry here? I'd suggest staring with pharma lobbyists, and defense/ NASA contractors.
I used to work as an engineer at the Ronler Acres fabs in Hillsboro 15 yrs ago. Over the last couple months every time I checked LinkedIn, there were so many announcements from people in lead roles that I had worked with stating their retirement or new position somewhere else. This brain drain is more like a lobotomy and it will be hard to recover.
You are spot on and Intel has done this before. The company had already ramped up the 120nm node on its 200mm production line in 2001 and also brought it's first 300mm line up on the same process node just be ensure the performance and yield were matched. This uncovered numerous startup issues and tool quirks that were resolved. The 120nm volume was very limited and they quickly moved to the 90nm node.
Concluding that the process is not ready yet for high volume production is either a frank assessment that the yield/reliability is insufficient or a very nuanced way of saying the performance doesn't meet its target.
I worked at Intel for many new process ramps and the yield was always an issue that got chipped away at fairly quickly. Admittedly the process now is much more involved and they've leaped over a number of generations with 18A and the learnings they would have gained. The yield improvement roadmap and their ability to execute to it is likely a huge question.
I abandoned Apple's products when they released the frilly coloured iMacs in the 90s but used proprietary screws to keep you from tinkering with the hardware. They were still at it decades later soldering RAM onto their lappy motherboards. But this taking of 30% from Patreon is like Scrooge taking the goose back from Cratchit. Humbug to Apple, I say.
"The South Korean consumer technology mega-corp posted a short video on Twitter — which now calls itself X — "
Oh, I'm so glad the author took the time to remind readers that X used to be called Twitter! Had almost forgotten in the intervening long 9 months.
Please be sure to keep mentioning it since some people don't pay attention to changes. Hey wait a minute.... when did elreg move from its co.uk domain?!
"No matter how much and how sophisticated hardware you can throw into a war, you'll still lose to the side that's prepared to throw in all that plus humans."
Not true. And Poland how things went for them when Hitler invaded. Poland fielded a WW1 army with cannons and horses versus modern German tanks and artillery.
This affected my business last week and I was thankful it didn't happen during a very busy time. I was able to get the POS tablets to work in offline mode for square after turning off the wireless and increasing the offline sales maximum amount. Of course, this risks a card being declined later once the transactions get processed, leaving us out our merch and the customer gone. This is not something our daily staff would know how to do if I hadn't been on-site. Something similar happened in 2022 also that prevented us from making realtime sales. This definitely has me looking into alternative POS systems.
As someone who has over 14 years engineering experience in fabs (including Intel) and a doctorate in electrical engineering, I spent 3 months looking for a chip job this summer only to find the job openings were for companies that had put hiring freezes in place. I finally took a took at a new EV battery company and will leave the semiconductor industry completely behind. I don't want to hear companies moaning about a worker shortage down the road when they won't invest in staff now.
If (and that's a big if) chatgpt can consistently predict sentiment for individual stock movements outside of normal market fluctuations, then that advantage is certainly going to be short-lived until every major stock broker employs its version of AI to do the same. It falls back to the theory of efficient markets. However, if some chatgpt large language model could be used to identify early and predict the impacts from black swan events (e.g. COVID, Russian aggression, mortgage-backed security failures, Chinese tech crack-downs, etc.) then some serious applications could be made.
One of the fabs I worked at was located on an old electronics manufacturing site dating back 80 years. It was so contaminated with waste it became a superfund site. While we were shutting down the fab, we discovered that the hydrogen gas lines supplying facility and neighboring buildings had a leak somewhere in-ground that had been ongoing for years. This isn't to mention that the gentleman I was backing up as an etch engineer was fighting (and later died from) a rare blood cancer.
The police should never need to hide from the light of scrutiny. However, if a 3rd party bystander live streams or records/edits a police encounter, it could violate the privacy of the person being arrested or anyone else at the scene. It could also bias a potential future jury. This is not a clear cut issue.
So what of it? It's their decision to not get a jab and to commingle. Freedom of expression and choice is a hallmark of liberal western democracies. Although I've had three jabs, I'm not one force others to do the same. I'll choose when/whether to mask and with whom to socialize. The totalitarians are those who take away that choice.
"as we enter year three of the COVID-19 pandemic, the convoy may well also be about bringing people together for yet another superspreader event."
Seriously, Jessica? Some random folks are coordinating to drive their semi's around in Winnipeg in a symbolic (mostly useless) protest and you feel the need to bring out one of the fear-porn tropes from 2020 to attempt to justify your dislike of anyone questioning the government? (President Xi is nodding in approval for you, by the way.) Where were your tirades about superspreader events going into Christmas or gatherings for the World Cup? I must have missed the torrential wave of COVID hospitalizations overwhelming the NHS in the weeks following the Queen's burial or England's loss in the Cup. I'd wager more called in hung over than ever did with COVID.
The only thing that spreads faster than the COVID virus or conspiracy theories is your kind of mob group-think. Science is fundamentally about questioning assumptions. Bullies shut that down.
Yes I agree with MiguelC that there is a lot of green washing going on these days as companies are guided by woke consensus groups jumping on the bandwagon. I'll add that there is little actual interest from the rest of the community at large too (only 5 comments after 4 days). If ANYONE else even reads this article, please just give a thumbs up or down!
I, for one, am glad to see Intel expand its manufacturing in the US. While the company is way too quick squeeze money out of governments or underpaid employees (I'm a former engineer there), the fab managers and engineers are data- focused do have a good focus on basic science, manufacturing and engineering. I wish the expansion goes smoothly. The company was lead by a bean counter for long enough to lose its main focus. We should all be thankful that AMD has a great chip design and that TSMC can make them. However competition is good for all of us and fabs outside of Taiwan are critical.
The process node names nowadays are symbolic rather than literal anyway. So while much hay is made of Intel finally doing 10nm while tsmc is on 5nm, the proof is in the chip performance per watt. Tsmc marginally has the edge for now but hopefully that lead will be challenged and it will be for the benefit of us all.
It is not a good sign that with a new manufacturing node (5nm) and an updated chip design, that the power envelope must be increased so much to achieve the performance gain. It reminds me of when Intel increased the power specs to over 100W on their Northwood and Prescott CPU's in the early 2000's because they couldn't compete with Athlon on a per-watt basis. I'll stick with my Ryzen3600 for now.
I'll miss the demise of the old Fab17 Intel site. Worked remotely with my counterparts there 20 years ago. One of the longest running issues we never fully resolved was that their PMOS ran hotter than the other fabs on the 120nm node. The VTP was always lower magnitude. We sent a half dozen splitlots between the fabs to isolate the source but the results we not conclusive. Rest in peace, F17
I for one and tired of Linus' over the top histrionics about careless developers crossing some imaginary line in imaginary head when he can't keep his own garden free of weeds. For FRICKIN YEARS I have dealt with the SND_HDA_INTEL module get screwed up during suspend and needing to do the "horror of linux horrors", reboot the computer to resolve it. It would be fixed with one kernel update and then screwed up yet again with the next. I've got a few choice and sweary words along with two big, fat fingers for him if Linus can't manage to keep fixes in place during kernel updates.
I can attest that Intel does indeed wall the garden much tighter after you give notice. I worked in the Oregon development fab 11 yrs ago before moving on. At least in the fab, most employees who gave notice would be escorted to the door and have their cube packed up & shipped to them, especially if they were going to work for any company deemed a competitor. I wasn't going to any such company so I was allowed to linger and tie things up for the couple weeks. However, my email was restricted to outgoing only and the fab badge was collected. It was like sort of like being a ghost.
At a former company I'd worked, maintenance turned off the wrong machine when attempting to perform some routine work. The unfortunate machine was a 20yr old Applied Materials etcher used in chip making. When they realized the mistake and turned it back on, it wouldn't boot. The company's contract with Applied had been allowed to lapse and along with that all the detailed knowledge of coaxing the beast through troubling computer issues. A contractor had to be brought in and ended up replacing the floppy drive with a SD card reader and card formatted to look like a 1.44Mb floppy disk imaged with the boot files. After 2 weeks of reconfiguring the machine, it was back up again and the company out many $100k.
"Scaleway is running a farm of Apple M1 Mac Minis..."
Apologies for the dense question, but why would anyone want this service? App development? Compiling binaries? If you can vnc or ssh into the server farm, then you clearly have a computer already and one that is likely better than any m1 mac mini. These units are not exactly speed demons with only 8gb ram / 256gb ssd.
I'm sure there's an obvious purpose for this service. Next round is on me.
Swan is taking the fall for the manufacturing issues at Intel. However, the development cycle from Rev99 base initial process to a production process rolled out to Intel's "virtual factory" runs about 4 years at the minimum. I know because I worked there.
There are more fundamental problems with the development team and Intel's divisional cpu architecture. These have not been addressed by the head swapping.
Yes, it is intentionally to confuse the consumer. I'm a former fab engineer at Intel's development site in Oregon (10 yrs ago). I asked one of the product engineers about the convoluted naming system at the time. He confirmed it was intentional as a means of focusing on the "core2" name and away from the raw MHz that had been the previous convention.
If I counted the layers on their sketch correctly, there are like 20 metal layers on these chips. That's a boatload of deposition, polish, via litho and etch, metal litho and etch, ALD dep at lower metal layers, copper electroplate at higher metal layers and polish again. With each step introducing defects. Hats off to getting a manufacturable process.
"Tragically, an Apple engineer was killed in the same year when his Tesla Model X accelerated into a roadside crash barrier."
No, not tragically. This is Darwin thinning the herd of those who blindly bet their life that every possible scenario has been preconceived, properly programmed, and correctly implemented with fully functioning sensors. Honestly, assuming ALL possible scenarios can be programmed into the software to allow autonomous driving is the definition of hubris. Of all people, this Apple engineer should have known better. And as an engineer myself, sorry, I'm not trusting my life or my family's to the rest of the lot.
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