throwaway9870

A basic knowledge of electricity. 100-200mA will kill you.

https://academic.oup.com/ptj/article-abstract/46/9/968/46379...

I have heard people say "that can't be right, because a car battery can source 100+ amps and touching those terminals doesn't kill me!" The reason is because you have a high enough impedance that 100mA doesn't flow from a 12V source through your body.

A large part of modern chip design is accomplishing what you are trying to do inside a given power budget. Thus, anything that lowers power is usually a huge win. Switching power in CMOS is roughly proportional to V^2 (basic textbook, real design includes a vastly larger number of issues), so lowering V is a huge win. Also, reducing the parasitic cap with a better process is a big win for a multitude of reasons. But shrinking the process generally would require the voltage to scale also because the gate oxide was getting thinner. That is not really true any more as we reach supply voltages that are so close the Von of the devices, but used to be a clear trend.

High voltages are good when you want to deliver power because that is what you need (motor HP, space heater, etc.). But we don't use an IC for power, we use it to do logic, and in that case, logic is just much more efficient at low voltages.

As someone who has designed many chips, amperage absolutely matters because it is not DC, it has very rapid transients based on workloads and that, combined with inductance, can make power delivery very difficult. Additionally, the high current requires careful design of the package and routing because of resistance and electromigration even in the DC case.

You cannot build a modern car engine without chips, let alone a car. Also, no way to hit safety requirements without chips (air bag deployment for example).

A little extra history. Grad students get an office, and their office was in the kitchen area of a trailer across the street from CIS. They ran Yahoo off a computer in this area and the head sys admin worked hard to handle the bandwidth requirements because it was saturating the network and causing problems for other users sharing that segment. He found them a better home for hosting (I think it was DEC), but they got funded right before they moved so that never happened. Stanford was great at helping students do projects like this, which is quite different from many other universities. I remember the e-mail from someone else in the trailer asking them if it was ok to pack their stuff up because it was clear they were not coming back. Good times.

Home Depot near me has all Milwaukee M12 and M18 tools locked up. When the Milwaukee rep was getting something out of the case for me, I mentioned how unfortunate it is that they have to do this. He said they lost over $700k in Milwaukee tools alone in that store last year. Quite amazing and almost hard to believe. I feel sorry for these stores trying to walk the line between respecting your customers and not being robbed blind.

That sounds like the lecture I was at. Thanks for sharing that, fun times. There were some really great lectures back then. I remember when Exponential gave their talk right after Apple moved away from the PowerPC architecture. Everyone knew their processor was a dud in every commercial way (super high-power BiCMOS PowerPC chip), but almost felt sorry for the guy and were amazingly polite.

The Pentium Pro and eventually the AMD64 chips equalled or bested the workstations on many tasks by the end of the 90's and early 2000s. But the Itanium processor distracted them from even competing. SGI for example had at least one high-end MIPS processor under development (iirc "the beast") and they stopped the project and later were trying to ship Itanium servers. HP threw the towel in and joined forces with Intel.

Here is an article from 1999 on Sun booting SunOS on Itanium:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/sun-boots-solaris-on-itanium-h...

Compaq stopped making Alpha servers and switched to Itanium:

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

Itanium was a huge misdirection and distraction for everyone in the workstation business and basically put them in such a bad spot they failed to even compete with Intel x86 past 2000 or so in any real way.

No question there are a lot of ways to win, probably many better than what transpired. But in the end, Itanium played a big role in Intel consolidating the CPU market and taking complete control for a significant period of time.

Alpha was DEC, HP had PA-RISC. I had a PA-RISC in my office and had to have facilities come and adjust air conditioning airflow because the computer put off so much heat.

I would like the suggest the Itanium was a huge business success. At the start of the 90s, there were many decent workstation CPUs: SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, and PA-RISC. Intel CPUs were not considered in the same class. Big engineering work was done on workstations powered by these chips. But as the decade went on, the chips became vastly more complex and expensive to design. Near the middle of the decade, it was becoming clear what the trajectory was and companies started looking around trying to figure out how to navigate this. On top of this problem, Intel/HP teamed up to design a processor that was quite beyond (in terms of complexity) anything being designed at the time and it became clear competing was just not economically feasible. So basically the industry folded. In one move, Intel took out entire industry of companies that could compete. PowerPC is still there, but is marginal. SPARC, PA-RISC, MIPS, and Alpha design teams are gone.

Interesting technical tidbit - I remember an Intel engineer giving a talk at Stanford about the architecture and Hennessy came to listen. At the end of the talk he asked why they thought moving so much complexity to the compiler would work when other (including John) found it to be problematic? They didn't have an answer and I could see the look on John's face and at that point realized they might not understand what they are getting into.

In addition to the comments I see here, one more note: seems like a lot of change at one time.

* Ansible

* Docker

* Big redesign

* New database cluster

* New firewall config

I have found great benefit to breaking problems down into smaller parts even though some times it causes some extra work.

Imagine you live in an economically unstable country and have $1000 that you want to preserve. You don't want to put it in your counties currency because of the inclination for the govt to do what venezuela did. US dollars have historically been the best option, but with the trajectory the US dollar is on, that might scare you due to inflation. Perhaps gold is an option, but how do you safely buy it and what are you going to do with gold coins? They can be stolen so easily. So this is the long-term allure of bitcoin. Put your money on the blockchain and all you have to do is remember a pass phrase to retrieve it. It doesn't suffer from inflation or govt debasing because it isn't controlled by a govt. It could be the best place to store money in terms and maintain constant buying power.

At least that is the idea, but in reality, it is a long way from that view. The issue is that people don't really buy into a consistent vision on what Bitcoin is and are still trying to figure out how much they value it and do price discovery. Let alone how it should be legislated. That being said, I believe the storage of value is a real problem and Bitcoin, or something like it, could be a valuable financial tool in a decade or so, once the dust has settled.

It reminds be a bit of the Internet back in the early 90s. All kinds of discussions and speculation, most of which ended up being very wrong, but the core technology ended up being dominant.

> If you live in an apartment complex it's ridiculous to have a truck.

Many tradesmen that don't get company vehicles like to own pickups because they can haul stuff for work and their jobsite. Some of those people might even live in apartments. Imagine that!

The amount of arrogance on this site is ridiculous. Just because you might know how to hook up a NAND gate or write some javascript code doesn't mean you are qualified to decide what vehicle someone should own. Please just stop the judgemental posts.

There is not flaw in the system. Trees and large shrubs come down. Municipal compost sites have the space and equipment compost large amount of material that home owners can't deal with. The arrogance in this thread is unbelievable.

I do maintenance on an office building and use it all the time.

I have never seen anything like this in manufacturing. Steel prices are double if you can find it at all. Plastic molders are operating under force majeure due to TX weather a few months back. Electronic assembly parts are in short supply and some, such as STM32 processors are almost impossible to find (such as variant for brushless controllers). One wire forming vendor we have worked with for over 20yrs cancelled our POs and said they can't even discuss when they might be able to work with us again because they don't have labour or raw materials.

The damage being done in manufacturing right now dwarfs anything from last year.

Nobody in their right mind would ever create a company in that environment. No bank would lend you money. Nobody would invest. Would you invest your life savings in a company when a random jury could just take it away?

A wrench and a screwdriver? Have you ever worked on any equipment at all? If so, you would realize how unrealistic that comment is.

Perhaps, but Asia does pretty well. Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, etc. all did amazing development in the last 30-60 years. The reality is that some cultures are better at it than others. Compare China to India for example.

There was a simulator called HSIM that I used 20 years ago to do what you describe. It had a C api that I integrated with. It was more of a fast Spice rather than equivalent to HSPICE or Spectre. I coupled it with a little mini-language I wrote to do easily scriptable regression tests for our system. I believe Synopsys bought the company.

I have a friend that lives in an area that drains into the Chesapeake bay. He is doing some changes to his property and is not allowed to do anything that would increase water run-off. OK, I said, that seems quite reasonable. Then he tells me it is for 12in of rain in 24hr. Wow, ok, that is a lot but I guess it could happen. Yes, it is a once in a 100yr storm. Then he tells me the rule is you have to handle that, and be prepared for another one within 48hrs. What?? Any water retention has to be drained within 24hrs so that if another storm hits it can be handled. So two, once in a century storms in a total of 72hrs. Kind of changes the definition of once in a century?

I just saw something that said these are the lowest temps in the last 30 yrs. That isn't once in a century!

What I don't understand is that it sounds like the utilities were unprepared for the cold because the windmills and gas lines froze up. But the same tech is used in Canada fine because it sounds like they plan for the cold and have equipment options designed to deal with ice, etc. So, you might immediately think - ah, climate change strikes again! But then I hear this is only a low temp in the last 30-40yrs. Who doesn't design a system to work at low temps that have occurred in the last 30-40 years?

So, the question is - is this system poorly designed? Were corners cut that should not have been?

I love good government and am not afraid of big government one bit. However, I HATE incompetent government that coasts on the work of others and whenever a problem comes up points fingers at everyone but themselves.

Add to my list above supplying safe drinking water and having an effective hurricane evacuation plan (I am looking at you New Orleans).

As opposed to having the government do what? Have a great COVID response? Have a coherent industrial policy? Have great fiscal management? Have financial integrity? Grant monopolies to service provides (ahem Comcast) instead of building proper infrastructure? Not building sufficient electrical infrastructure? Enticing poor young people to make terrible money decisions relative to school and then saddling them with non-dischargable loans? Spending money to fight endless wars? In the middle of a pandemic pass a bill that sends millions overseas while Americans can't pay their medical, food or housing bills?

I will take the capitalist over these government clowns any day of the week.

Moderna created a vaccine in less than a day. Even with a year to think about it, my state and county still can't decide where the mass vaccination site should be located.

Our government has coasted for too long and is incompetent. When the world decides to quit paying the dollar tax imposed via Fed printing, it will be a rude awaking for all Americans.

It is fine to buy a few things from an untrusted supplier off Amazon. It is a whole other issue to run production based on unreliable or untrusted suppliers. I have yet to ever see a company serious about production that would do this.

Are you in production? Or just think this is a good idea?

How does a blockchain ensure they ship the materials I requested? Did they harden the metal properly? Were the electronic parts purchased from a reliable supply chain so I don't get reclaimed ones? Did they use the right PSI steel? Did they test to known and documented quality standards, or do they ship me the ones that work, but fail quality checks that they reserve for their big customers?

I have manufactured a lot of electronic and physical products, and have had a lot of supply chain issues, but not one of them would have been solved with a blockchain.

Clearly the purpose of a company is to provide value to customers that they are willing to pay for. Any company where the sole purpose is to grow will find itself out of business quickly.

I had an employee adopt a foster child around 10-11yrs old. Quite an eye opener for me. Employee missed a huge amount of time (which I allowed with no questions) because the child just could not function. When they put the child in school, the police were called a couple times a week (I am not exaggerating). Finally, the child accused one of new parents of child abuse because they were not allowed to do something. Child services took the child back in custody but no charges were pressed because everyone involved knew what was going on and what happened. My employee that adopted this child was heart broken and talked to them everyday even a year later. Truly a terrible situation.

Bottom line: young children can be broken severely at a very young age and it is extremely hard to fix then going forward.