Posts by P0l0nium

Been there, Done that...

I'm an ex Intel Product Engineer and I've seen a few "new process" introductions. What I can tell you is this:

Launching your brand spanking new "Bleeding edge" large-die flagship product on a brand spanking new barely qualified "Bleeding edge" process is a BAD idea. I mean : What could POSSIBLY go wrong?? And having one of your suppliers pull out on yield grounds is a BAD sign.

I'm waiting for this to fall apart on reliability grounds and degenerate into a slanging match.

"What do you mean 3% of them are failing after a week in a Phoenix parking lot? Show me your qual data"

"errr ... We ignored some data points to keep Chairman Chang and the investors happy".

Where is Neelie Kroes?

Where is Neelie Kroes when she's actually NEEDED!

("European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda" and ex "European Commissioner for Competition")

You'd have thought that sorting out EU government document standards and ensuring no one establishes an unfair monopoly was right up her street.

Or did Megasoft wound her so badly last time that she's cowering in a corner somewhere?

A Hundred and Five !!!

105 comments in a day! .... haven't you lot got anything more constructive to do?

Oh wait, its an article on "gaming" so the answer has to be : "No!"

If they were REAL communists ...

"Proper" communists would be having a witch-hunt to find the "saboteur" by now...

Like Beria used to after Soviet atomic bomb test 'fizzles'.

Oooh ... they missed earnings by $0.01!

Lets employ a teenager with a religious grudge to write an article full of hyperbole.

Areo vs NBC/ABC

Isn't this the same issue as the US supreme court are addressing in their Aereo vs NBC/ABC case?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/13/supreme_court_agrees_to_hear_aereo_case_toot_suite/

Basically, can you receive a broadcast and retransmit it over a wire to a specific user?

If that's allowable in the EU (which it is) then the whole thing can be circumvented by a European version of Aereo.

You simply pay your TV bill in Greece and pay Areo for a feed from it.

I see a business opportunity in Spain :-)

It deserves to die....

Given that 40 channels of UK broadcast TV conspired to show NOTHING worth watching over the 12 days of Christmas, the sooner its dead the better.

Inform, Educate, Entertain ? Errrrr...... not so much.

Shiny..rectangular..rounded ..

Sinclair should have patented the concept..

"A shiny, rectangular ,technological THING with rounded edges, restricted functionality and a short lifetime. Acts as an extension to your self-esteem and may be attractive to other shallow-minded fools.

Can be used to waste large amounts of personal time."

He'd have made a fortune.

"Its the economics, stupid"

This phone is not going to win any awards BUT Intel has some good reasons to drive the use of older "Clover Trail" and "Medfield" chips in phones and tablets.

1) It fills their otherwise redundant 32nm older fabs.

2) Since they actually perform quite well, it provides competition in the mid-range of the market and reduces profitability for everyone else. This makes the competition at the high end less "competitive" as they have to charge more to pay off their bank loans.

There is a whole raft of Chinese "white box" tablets with the same 32nm chips and even Dell is in on the 32nm act. "Merrified" phones on 22nm are coming in Q1.

1st ARM Domino falls in Fairyland.

Calxeda dead? How can this be? We are repeatedly told that ARM based servers will be little bundles of energy efficient goodness surrounded by open-source wizardry and pixie-dust.

Surely some white-knight venture capitalist must be prepared to pony-up another $90M to reap the fruit from the tree of success ... Nope! Its all smoke and mirrors apparently, quel surprise!

And, of course nothing to to with the recently-spun "Twin ogres of Google and Facebook" story about them just dying to eat ARM based servers ... Nope! , that was smoke and mirrors too, it seems and related to attempts to garner funding . Shame on you Investment bankers :Trying to make me pour my pension fund into an "evidence-free" ARM based black hole.

Merry Christmas SeaMicro :-) and a Merry Christmas to Qualcomm and TSMC for 2016

Pacemaker??

Magnetic resonant induction with a 1 meter range... What could possibly go wrong???

I can't wait to cut a "swathe of death" through my local hospital cardiac waiting room.

Its a step forward BUT the over-riding problem with big batteries is this:

"What happens when I decide to dump all my energy at once"

Having witnessed 2 people get fried to death in a Ford Pinto in Arizona (where the limiting factor was how fast the air could get to the gasoline) I figure that any large battery is simply a sleeping bomb.

The thought of millions of these things careering down our high streets after 10 years of zero maintenance fills me with horror.

We see it with laptop and smartphone batteries. Imagine a thing 1000X that size.

We see it on 787s, imagine a thing 50X that size built to the cheapest possible spec.

Or are they going to be encased in steel and vented overboard like on the 787?

I recognise most of these, in fact I WAS one.

In defence of managers: someone's got to do it... Are they born evil, or are they made evil?

Or are only the evil promoted?

Our Islamic cousins actually have a pretty laid-back view of creation timescales.

They interpret the OT as saying God created the universe in 7 "periods" and they are open to a "period" being millions of years.: No conflict with reality there ....

Where they fall down is evolution, as follows:

So, mice evolved from small dinosaurs? - OK!

And squirrels evolved from mice? - OK!

And lemurs evolved from squirrels? - OK!

And monkeys evolved from lemurs? - OK!

And chimpanzees evolved from monkeys?- OK!

And humans evolved from chimps? - INFIDEL!

The meaning of 'INTERCEPT"

What's missing here is a legal analysis of what "INTERCEPT" means. and I think it all hinges on whether the bulk content is read by a human or by a machine.

If "INTERCEPT" means "A computer reads and analyses the contents of the communication and delivers 'just cause' for the contents to be read by a human" - then NSA and GCHQ are operating ILLEGALLY because that's what has happened here.

If it means "A person reads the contents of the communication without 'just cause' " - then they are operating LEGALLY because that's NOT what happened.

If I route all the email in the world through my electricity meter - have i 'intercepted' it?

I predict a "Plague of Lawyers" .

"which means that we, the consumers, will be the ultimate victors ..."

Don't think so .... We're about to enter an era where "The competition" isn't competitive enough and that will have 2 effects:

1) Price of tier 1 mobile devices will rise as Intel extracts is "pound of flesh" in order to recoup its zillion dollar capital investment.

2) The EU bureaucrats will declare Intel a monopolist citing their dominant market share as evidence and will issue fines for some yet-to-be-devised infraction of competition rules.

Strange old world: I'm off to build a 22nm Fab in my back-yard ... Oh wait... You can't!, its really hard.

Oh never-mind - I'll just build my superfast Quad-core Krait thing on TSMC's new 16nM process.

Nope , can't do that either because it doesn't work.

How about Samsung .... Nope, lost the plot 2 years ago.

And you're left with ....... an X86 chip in your Iphone.