13,766 karma · joined June 12, 2016
Amazon Microsoft Google are hats riding on top of CPU vendors.
And these hats, honestly speaking, are doing much better than semis.
Moscow, Petersburg - Putin spends extraordinary amount of money to hold the veneer of normalcy. I would say that urban poor are now seeing even more money as the city hires more janitor, drivers, and carpenters.
Rest of Russia — life like in North Korea, as it always been for the past 30 years.
Most impacted — Yikaterinburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok. These are the only few cities in Russia with working economy without artificial economic boosting. Whatever non-military manufacturing there been is down. Chem is down as high-tech catalysts been all imported. Recreational/services/entertainment — dead as few middle class people powering it are leaving. IT — double digit personnel loss, double digit industry shrinking.
Another question, WHO will live in Neom? Saudi Arabia only have 19-20 million native citizens, the rest are all expats.
On other hand, I would say civil service in India is horrifically elitist, and values degrees, over competency, and real experience.
I have tons of Indian friends, and spent months on assignments in South Asia.
There is absolutely no contest to the idea that IT been overwhelmingly, massively beneficial for South India, far exceeding all maladies. Anybody coming with an idea like "lets bulldoze Bengaluru because hipsters say so," or punitively tax IT will be skinned alive there.
Anti-development agenda does resonate within the country at all sans few communist holdout areas. It is universally outside party discourse, nationalists are for the IT, congress are for IT, even communists are for IT lately, and whomever says otherwise will be voted out faster that you can blink.
Similarly, people pooing on manufacturing relocating to South Asia have zero idea how damn glad people are for new factories coming there. Valley hipsters coming to "save oppressed workers" are surprised when the same workers, and union leaders come to violently lash out at them.
For Bluetooth, at least for a major vendor, it's unthinkable that they wouldn't be able to come to Bluetooth SIG, and call out the issue, and have it worked on until it's solved. But more usual, issue will be highlighted at the certification, and test stage.
You would not believe how much more money they began to make once they started selling power using scratch cards. It was n-times the difference.
People, paradoxically, spend more when they can easily see how much they spend.
My impression was that Quanta does way more for Framework than final integration. Well, good to see that somebody takes on the design themselves today.
> The cost of developing a from scratch laptop like ours is closer to the mid seven figures.
With most of that being the cost of buying the reference design, and access to the documentation I believe?
I last worked on a budget Atom laptop back in 2014. Back then the docs were freely available with enough good Googling, as well as commercial quantities of Atom chipsets sold around Intel's channel. Now I believe it's near impossible without going through an Intel approved IDH.
Designing a laptop from scratch may be an adventure with a budget close to $200k-$300k, but there are tons, and tons of US brands who can pull this financially. Yet, even the "innovative" Framework laptop is mostly OEM work. It seems no Western brand took risk designing own hardware since nineties.
I've been a privy to Dell's plans for launching a low-end sub-brand for Asia few years ago, before the COVID.
Every contact manufacturer they been considering was exuberant about an opportunity to launch something original under Dell's brand, but Dell's MBAs were horrified of the prospect giving franchisees permission to run own designs: "what if they will make something too good, and compete with our main brand?", "what if they will screw up the design, and degrade our brand?", "how we will square this off with our part suppliers if we will divert them to another party?"
I myself would've eagerly taken an opportunity to spin up my own laptop brand, with original design. It's far, far easier than most these fellows imagine, and certainly shouldn't cost many millions.
> I ask my fellow Americans in near disbelief: have you become so desensitized that this news does not move you?
Not desensitized, but infantilised beyond belief, including here on HN.
The encouragement to run away, and shelter from "scary world" and outrage produced people who cannot hold a serious adult conversation about war, death, and personal duty for longer than a few minutes.
You either get completely emotionally deaf types like the top poster, or, on the opposite, types who outright descend into hysteria.
RIP Abe.
You read stories of ones who were caught, and you cannot make it it up. Their main recruitment target are idiots in places of high power.
KGB recruited more agents than real spies. They had many more people doing lobbying, covert propaganda, and subversion, than peeking into Western secrets.
They really valued their high profile spies, but their influence agents — "pomogaikas" were near disposable. Finding idiots in places of power was always easier than finding smart, ideologically motivated betrayers fit for espionage assignents.
Indeed, even with "free" heat from CHP you can get an economic net loss.
Every house connected is a lot if piping, most of it unproductive — heating empty space, and losses in piping. So CHP district heating work best with large apartment buildings, and worst with single family housing.
This way Danish 65C° district heating for detached housing may be the worst example of district heating adoption.
And even if you do have only commie block style apartments, you may still end with having to add extra heat from local boilers in very cold climates. There regions in Russia where heating eats 1/3 of regional GDP.
But an overall, does district heating makes sense? Hell yes, and it must be made mandatory in the West one way, or another, along with policies to prevent counterproductive outcomes.
The big point of putting optics on chip, or at least close to the chip is to reduce power consumption.
Huge terabit class router chips spend 1/3 of TDP to drive PHYs.
If you just replace a power hungry copper transmitter with a power hungry optical transmitter, you don't gain in power budget, and lose on cost.
Why? Tons of Software was written for XP, and then abandoned without any support. Many of that stuff in the government sector. A lot of online banking clients outright say "only works on XP," and copyright years reads 2006.
This is similar how Android 7+ support was almost nuked in China for nearly a year because Tencent didn't want to port Wechat to newer APIs cuz "nobody uses Android newer than 4.X in China"
Whether trade deficits are good, or bad depends on your monetary policy.
In case of Germany, it was definitely bad after them having such low interest rates for so long.
It was Germany's pride — it's manufacturing industry which took damage from low rates the most.
For as long as it can't run Windows, it's not a competitor.
A mass market chip will never survive the yield on such extremely large dies.
Most of mass market chips will be many times smaller physically to make money.
Apple does not make money on these chips.
If there will be a massive double digit global switch to EVs, green hydrogen becomes uneconomical to produce.
P.S. Carl immigrating to Britain is certainly marks an end of the era for Chinese tech industry, he was probably the last of young stars still living in China
Only multigigawatt nuclear desal can privide so much fresh water economically.
Imho, non-wireless-intergrated MCUs will go extinct in IoT very soon.
They also have the best mixed signal out of every other scrawny IoT startup who uses off-the-shelf IP.