RandomOpinion

If I understand it correctly, it is the process of depositing the HfO2 onto the wafer in a way that it retains its ferroelectric properties and is compatible with other chipmaking processes that is proprietary. Depositing it improperly would result in defects at the junction between the HfO2 and the underlying gate that would render the FeFET nonfunctional.

>There shouldn't be such a controversial. Credit is not a zero-sum game.

Prestige and credit matters quite a bit in academia, for example, when seeking tenure or getting appointed to a endowed chair.

Back in 2010, I was on a team with a intake of about 1 TB per day of mapping data, all of which needed to be integrated with previous data and condensed into processed output. I quite assure you that we cared a _lot_ about the runtime complexity of our algorithms.

All the really interesting jobs require knowing data structures, algorithms and discrete mathematics well.

>What should I learn so that I can become competent for jobs other than web development?

Your question is meaningless without specifying what sort of job you'd prefer or what your interests are. There is no single set of things (other than "everything") you could study that would qualify you for all non-webdev jobs.

>Here's what this means. Intel has about 10% advantage in process technology. Yet despite that, AMD's chip is still 10% smaller than Intel's chip. That gives AMD an effective 20% architectural advantage over Intel for similar performance.

No, the conclusion you should be drawing is "AMD is using ~20% less transistors per core. What did AMD not implement that Intel did and how badly does that hurt Ryzen's performance?"

The Luddites and the textile industry come immediately to mind.

"At one time there were more British soldiers fighting the Luddites than there were fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

>I once worked in a company where the managers were paranoid about us leaking the source code of the game we developed.

Not necessarily unwarranted; I still remember the leak of the source code for Half-Life 2 making headlines back in 2003.

https://games.slashdot.org/story/03/10/02/1547218/half-life-...

(Good grief, has it really been that long since Half-Life 2? I feel old.)

"Early Retirement May Be The Kiss Of Death, Study Finds": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/early-retirement-may-be-...

"Study: Later retirement may help prevent dementia": http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/15/study-r...

Other references are easy to find. Giving up the structure and purpose of one's life and building a new one on your own is not an easy transition to make, regardless of what young people think.

> Maybe the "entire South" should increase their rates if they want to compete on talent. I have no sympathy for a company that can't find talent because "we don't pay SV rates because we're not in SV".

Then the "entire South" is going to start charging you and me SV rates for their products and services. Probably not what you had in mind.

That's part of the tradeoff for software development not being a licensed and regulated profession. (The other half of the tradeoff being that anyone, regardless of education or credentials, can be a software developer.) You can't have your cake and eat it too.

>Lots of doctors and automotive engineers just do their job and then come home, in fact most employees don't come home and continue to work on semi work related things on their spare time. My wife is a civil engineer and yet she doesn't build a 1/16 scale bridge in our basement when she comes home. Does that make her a bad civil engineer?

Perhaps not the best example you could have chosen: Physicians and licensed engineers do have mandatory continuing education requirements that more or less require them to be learning for a lifetime.

Why blame Nadella? Terry Myerson headed up the Windows Phone division during its long slide into oblivion before being promoted to head up the entire Windows division when Nadella became CEO. He's specifically responsible for dropping the ball, if anyone is.

Businesses hire people to solve a problem. (Big surprise.) Therefore, to answer the question effectively, you need to figure out what problems they need to have solved[0]. Figuring this out includes the research on the company you've (hopefully) done before applying, reading and fully understanding the job description, and asking questions during the screening & interview loop along the lines of "What issues is your business trying to solve?", "What role(s) do you want the person that you hire to play?", "What pain points does your organization have?", etc.

From there, the response should more or less write itself: "My experience/skills in X, Y, and Z are going to help you solve problems A, B, and C that you're having" or, for less senior applicants, "I'm very interested in learning more about the technologies/skills you need me to have to solve problems A, B, C and my past work in I, J, K shows that I can acquire those skills easily and will be effective in applying them to your problems."

[0] This includes ones that they may not even know they needed to have solved.

>But the truth is, it's perfectly possible for anyone to adjust their sleep schedule and become a morning person.

Quite false. Yes, the standard sleep hygiene rules[0] can be helpful to those not already following them but they're not effective for everyone, particularly if they have a complicating condition.

[0] For those interested, a more complete list is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_hygiene

>What you need is a kernel that exposes programs as a file system like plan9

Powershell?

>Essentially, PDFs force a certain page size on you. ...

Not necessarily. Sony's early readers had automatic reflowing of text if you chose a larger font size. It worked really well for fiction or any other type of text without pictures/diagrams.

For modern e-readers, converters like the free Calibre software (https://calibre-ebook.com), will allow resizing & reflow of text in PDFs to a size more usable for any device.

>Sony used to make 9" readers ...

There are refurbished Sony PRS-900 units available (e.g. eBay) for around $50 and, unlike most e-readers, they have user-replaceable batteries.

>In my experience, companies don't care about your little side project when hiring--that is, unless your "little side project" had some huge impact or is something they have been aware of--the best you could get is "huh that's cool", and that's it, unless you created something really unique.

Something else to consider: Depending on the corporate policy on open source, employees may be forbidden to look at external source code without prior approval by the legal department. This is more likely at large companies who are afraid of lawsuits accusing them of copying code or ideas (and, yes, it does happen). So, your interviewers may not even be permitted to look at your portfolio anyway.

>What does one do with such a cluster?

They presented a short paper at FCCM '16: http://fpga.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/grvi_phalanx_fccm... Section VI lists possible applications.

> ...but I've worked on some projects where you want to leave the computer running overnight, because you need to run a long job, or you want to soak test something, or whatever.

Manually run the update check and install all the patches before starting the long job. Problem solved.

>They explicitly refuse to accept prepaid cards even though they are VISA/MasterCard (BTW the same problem with Google Compute)... or am I doing something wrong?

Prepaid cards can be purchased anonymously. If you were running a cloud provider, would you rent a server to somebody who was essentially untraceable?

> And how does one actually track progress of an agile team to begin with?

You've hit upon the key question: you want a progress metric that's in-line with productivity. IMO, assessing that comes down to evaluating whether functionality/code delivered (at a high level) per sprint is reasonable, evaluating whether the task breakdown the team is operating against is sensible and whether tasks are being accomplished in a reasonable amount of time relative to their difficulty, the skills of the person doing them, etc. In other words, the evaluation needs to be specific and include the circumstances: Saying "Why did implementing XYZ take longer than one would normally, even taking into account ABC?" is going to result in fixing the real issue whereas saying "Why is your velocity number so low?" is going to result in "fixing" the number.

That, in turn, requires the manager to either possess solid software engineering skills or have access to someone possessing those skills who can make the assessment in their place. And, yes, it's a lot more work. But, as has been amply documented, attempting to manage off a single number (a self-reported number, no less), simply doesn't work.

> I can visibly tell the devs walking out of the room spend more time worrying about "velocity" and "organisation of work" than the money making work that needs to be done. It almost feels like the agile process gives them "one more job" of picking the doable things from the list of stuff that needs to be done so they look better than their peers with better velocity.

Classic symptom of managers using agile as a (micro)management tool. Velocity, burndown charts, etc. are meant to be used by the team as a self-calibration tool. Managers do not get a say in what they think the velocity should be, either for the team or for individuals. If they do so, they create an incentive (let's be blunt, an overwhelming incentive) for the team/individuals to game them and that way lies madness.

(As an aside, the best response I've ever seen to this type of dysfunction is a team who simply decided to retcon the charts on the fly to make the work committed to match the work done. Management was happy that the burndown chart was right on target, developers were free to be fully productive instead of worrying about what their velocity looked like; it was a win-win solution all around.)

You're looking at the past through rose colored glasses. Most games of a decade ago did not have a mod scene. Those few that did either had active / tacit support from the developer or were loved enough that fans did the work of reverse engineering them.

> GIMP is free software and ethical

Implying that non-free software is unethical? That's a rather rude thing to say.

Not to rain on your worldview or anything but I must point out that one of the requirements for being in upper management that's public facing is the ability to say just about anything with a straight face. ("Courage" anyone?) The fact that Tim Cook came up with a good (from a PR perspective) response doesn't say anything about the actual motivation.

I have a milder form of the same phenomenon and find that workman's style fingerless gloves (I use DeWalt Technician Fingerless Gloves[0] and can vouch for them.) are enough to reduce it to a tolerable level. They are thick enough to retain warmth and highly durable but leave the fingertips unimpeded for mousing / typing.

In your circumstance, I'd look into USB-powered heated gloves as an option as well, e.g. [1]. If that alone isn't sufficient, some have removable heating elements that you could probably transfer over to the heavier fingerless gloves mentioned above.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/DPG230L-Technicians-Fingerless-Synthe...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/GoodBZ-Fingerless-Mittens-Computer-St...

More like the early Sun "pizzabox" SPARCstation workstations, I would think.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_5

>...noise cancelling cans...

Active noise cancelling systems generally only suppress continuous steady sounds, e.g. fan noise or motor hum. It actually makes conversations and other transient activities _more_ audible by reducing the background sound.

>you have to be careful with the Microsoft stack, they would have you chasing your tail with the constant stream of new frameworks and tools.

It's not as if that couldn't be said about the other popular stacks as well.

>I never played PA, but I'm pretty confident I would be meh on it.

People like to trash Planetary Annihilation but it's not really deserved. Yes, it doesn't scratch the TA itch as well as one might wish but it's a decent game in its own right.