I suggest you open Google Earth and type in: Samsung Austin fab. I live about 5 miles east of it. Up through the A7 generation this is where the processors for Apple’s iPhones were built. The Samsung fab is state of the art, since 1997 they have spent 17 billion dollars in building and then upgrading it. You are also slighting the skills of Intel which has fabs in Hillsboro, Oregon and Chandler, Arizona. Samsung was number 1 in semiconductor revenue in 2019, with Intel in second, and TSMC far behind in third.
No one is fabricating at 6nM. Samsung and TSMC call their smallest process 7nM and Intel calls theirs 14nM. Since they are Fin-FETs the claimed dimension is mostly marketing. Interesting trivia, the transistor is the most numerous manufactured device in world history. The total number made is 13 Sextillion. The most powerful supercomputer in the world is Summit built of IBM Power9 processors and Nvidia GPUs.
Many essential semiconductor products are built in older fabs sprinkled around the country and while you aren’t aware of them they are just as necessary for cell phones and the other devices that make our lives better. I’m an LADA Type 1.5 diabetic and I wear a continuous glucose monitor stuck to back of my arm. In one chip is a 16 bit RISC processor, A/D converters, temperature sensor, and NFC wireless radio.
]]>I consider FrameMaker and OrCAD to be the two must have Windows programs.
]]>Do you really want to ban kids phones at school?
]]>There was a professor from Rice University who gave an analysis of the source code for the Diebold voting machine. One example should suffice: the password for the system was defined as a string constant with no way to change it. I asked him: "Based on your examination of the code, what grade would you give a student who turned in a project of this quality?" "F."
Another issue discussed was the need for a paper trail. It was pointed out that all the voting machine makers had machines that produced a printed ballot as a record. They are required in the south american market. No jurisdiction in the US requires a paper trail so there are none offered.
]]>The punchline is that Babbage with the help of Joseph Clement and Joseph Whitworth, two of the finest mechanics of the time, failed. Edvard Scheutz a 17 year old Dane succeeded. Anyone who wishes to write real steampunk should read this. Especially valuable is the discussion of why there was no market for the successful difference engine.
]]>Are you perhaps thinking of the works of Conlon Nancarrow? He was an American composer who moved off to Mexico to take advantage of its cheaper cost of living.
Almost his whole output was composed for player piano. The rhythmic and metrical complexity of his work was beyond human execution. Some of it is really a lot of fun in a madhouse sort of way.
]]>For a while Tenex and its successor were the one real rival of UNIX in academic computing. You might liken it to Mithraism in relation to Christianity.
DEC chose to kill it off in favor of VMS.
]]>A car bomb would break a lot of glass and damage some equipment. You would do more real damage to the fab if you used it to cut power. Though I suspect that there is one hell of a backup power system on site.
]]>Levenson packs into 165 pages a story it takes Neal Stephenson 3000 pages of the baroque cycle to tell.
]]>These are just a few of them many smart appliances that people don't want to live without.
]]>I can imagine a few things that a power meter might reveal. Does your house have a persistent load that might indicate you are growing pot under lights in your basement?
]]>What Justin is appealing to is not just the numinous. I'm sure an Orthodox believer can experience the numinous with the aid of an icon that makes no claim to being a holy relic. Justin's claim is akin to that of a Fundamentalist whose belief in God is reinforced because he believes every word of the bible is literally true.
People like that have a brittle faith that tends to crumble if you make them sit down and study the bible. They find the many internal contradictions, mistaken prophecies, and anachronisms destructive to their faith. Their other possible reaction is to double down and become even more rigid in their dogma.
I grew up in a town that is considered the buckle of the bible belt. To preserve my sanity I always considered myself an anthropologist living in the midst of a tribe displaced in time.
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