teemwerk

There's also buybacks, which has mostly been tech companies' weapon of choice when it comes to capital return.

I don't want to split hairs because you are correct, and this isn't really directed at you.

I'd just like to point out that if you believe in roughly efficient markets, if your enterprise maintains its value, if you amass a pile of cash, that will be reflected in your share price.

The dividends come directly out of that share price whenever issued. You can theoretically amass a pile of money that would make Smaug blush, and this will increase your share price to reflect. But that cash isn't being reinvested, it's only going to increase linearly with respect to that cash position. Which is why in many circumstances investors frown upon it.

I don't follow, Sigma hasn't stopped using Foveon sensors, they still use the Foveon Quattro stuff afaik. Now they use a 1:1:4 ratio for R/G/B layer resolution, where the blue layer also records luminance.

They decided they wanted to confuse people more when they tried to compare it to a Bayer sensor.

Maybe a bit tangential, but from an economic it's interesting to see Intel's market cap vs TSMC, given that TSMC is purely a foundry. Nowadays what 10nm or 14nm actually means is a lot fuzzier than previous nodes, but the general consensus seems to be Intel's fab tech lead is either pretty precarious or already gone, so I'm just gonna assume even (which is admittedly a poor, oversimplified assumption).

Then TSMC and Intel are pretty even, which is slightly interesting to extrapolate all manner of conclusions.

Intel has slowly opened it's fabs to outsiders, however the first one was Altera, who Intel now owns, so... Main point is in 20, 30 years, is Intel's main business going to be fabbing their own chips, or someone else's? I dunno, I just enjoy following the industry.

TI and Cypress through Ramtron has done quite a bit of work incorporating ferroelectric materials into CMOS processes and such for FeRAMs mostly. Obviously RAMs are not transistors but the work is certainly relevant. Like the article says, the large feature size for ferroelectrics has mostly been the limitation for ferroelectric applications.

>he actually seemed like a nice person. I also enjoyed his trollish sense of humor.

I see where you're coming from and don't want to get pedantic, but isn't as trollish sense of humor by definition at least a little mean-spirited?

The "Late Shore Limited" I've taken has on-time performance of ~50% and train interference as 50% of delays. That sounds about right.

That's not really an honest interpretation.

The part you're ignoring is future earnings. Assuming a company maintains its earnings, you have a bigger slice of the pie next quarter. If the company trades at the same EPS multiple, your stake definitely has gained value. You're totally ignoring enterprise value.

In a vacuum, nothing has changed about a company's future earnings when they repurchase shares.

The kind of bizarre roundabout way to consider it is if Apple bought 25% of itself with its money mountain (they can't, beside the point), your stake in the company goes up because you own shares in Apple, which in turn owns 25% of itself.

You effectively have more equity in Apple when it buys its own shares.

i don't know how truly random a crc function is, but they're really cheap to implement in an fpga. especially if you're just pulling the bit off the end for a bitstream, and you can just feed the output or some polynomial into the input instead of an input stream. but that's where my thoughts end.

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

spotify premium is $10. it used to be if you subscribed to spotify premium through the app store it cost $13 because Apple literally wants 30% of any money that changes hands through the app store. otherwise you give spotify $10 directly and go on your way.

that really doesn't sound so bad. at least curiosity piquing enough to work out more of the economics and impact of using reverse osmosis water in agriculture.

I would think it might not hold up so feasible for non-cash crops, but at first glance that seems pretty cool that you might be able to use reverse osmosis water for crops. I guess you just have to convince/get farmers to give up their cheap water ha.

The Dell takeover valuation decision got overturned, which is quite reasonable to say the least.

However the valuation do-over was thought to be a solution is beyond me. The question of the case was "was Dell transparent in his direction for the company, and was the market process by which they auctioned off Dell fair and open?" Trying to rend some valuation of the company that no one was willing to pay and deciding 'that's the one' was weird.

Of course every group of stakeholders is going to have a different idea of what they're willing to pay for the company, that's why they had a bidding process. If the judge came up with something lower than what Silver Lake and Dell came up with, would the former shareholders have to give money back?

Matt also unsurprisingly wrote about it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-15/appraisal...

You're underestimating your particular circumstances, and forgetting a gamechanger: roommates. I can't even begin to count how many fights, squabbles, arguments disappeared when we got a dishwasher. The value of an empty sink shouldn't be taken for granted no matter your circumstances.

they issued another $100 million in the last day.

I don't want to spam this article all over, but Matt Levine, also at Bloomberg, I felt had a much better overview of that question almost verbatim, plus imo he's an excellent writer.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-16/softbank-...

I think you'll find varied opinions in an organization as sprawling as Bloomberg. My favorite writer Matt Levine had a short blurb about this, he's consistently pretty sharp with a dash of humor.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-16/softbank-...

The first thing that comes to mind is that debt stops making sense. In addition to your interest rate, your principle becomes more expensive over time.

A mortgage, a car payment, becomes more expensive over time since the deal was struck when prices were higher. A bitcoin can buy you a heck of a lot more now, but the mortgage you signed in 2014 was for 200 bitcoins. Uh oh...

Now, of course you can argue the necessity of credit until the cows come home. The bottom line is whatever credit is to you, deflation really throws a wrench in it.

Naively, other things the same, the best time to take out credit for something you need is now. Under a deflationary currency that time is never.

From the wikipedia entry and the court documents it references, Google was required to make ITA's software available for licensees for five years after the judgement in October 2011.

Skimming those papers and reading about the silicon tunable lasers was a bit mind blowing.

I studied optics a bunch in college but never managed to work it into my electrical engineering job. Might be lame, but I didn't have any clue this kind of integration was possible yet, it's certainly quite exciting. Probably the coolest thing I've read about in quite some time.

That's an interesting thought, does the government have cpi-like numbers for different localities, or just the one number?

Rents are included in cpi, but home prices aren't. Now, of course they are correlated, but that's certainly one of the arguments against using cpi.

edit: answered my own question, the bureau of labor statistics has more numbers than you can shake a stick at.

I am by no means stating it as a conclusion, but rather just as a discussion point, how does this differ from the mutual funds and etfs under a single umbrella, i.e. something like vanguard? Where the stated mission is sort of long term stewardship over the short term activist role.

Now, how well that mission is fulfilled is another thing. The reason I note vanguard specifically is because of the current activist spat between P&G and Nelson Peltz/Trian Partners. Of the top 3 holders (vanguard, black rock, state street), only vanguard voted against the activist shakeup.

I guess I'm just having trouble seeing the difference between giving a bunch of small investors more power, vs a large amount of krill with similar goals making up a whale the company can't ignore. It seems the tenure setup complicates a lot without immediately perceptible benefit, at least to me.

I definitely agree, the part that struck a chord with me was

"...everyone's just trying to get instagrams. You know, like is that what art's becoming, is like what you're experiencing and sending out into the world? I don't know. I just think it's interesting and that's the reality of the world we live in right now."

I think if you look at this with pessimism or loathing for what art has become you're really missing the point. These artists seemed pretty genuine about how they were experimenting with involving the audience as a part of the installation, or building things based around the fact that the audience is going to involve themselves whether you like it or not.

They make a dirt cheap (~$20) vertical mouse that helped me correct wrist problems from bad posture overnight. I don't use anything else for long periods of time, they singlehandedly (pun not intended) helped me fix my wrist problems. And I use it for gaming just as well.

Anker is dope.

These are always so wonderful. The size limitation is the icing, they are always so gorgeous on their own. The advantage is always in seeing what cool tricks they do to make awesome stuff that is defined by such little information.

Yeah, but he's talking about the conversion kits to digitize input on a typewriter. That's next level annoying.

Yep, this right here. You really need a good reason to choose an FPGA. The inherent throughput and a lot of stuff is incredibly powerful, but the development is much more involved. To me anything sufficiently nontrivial always feels building a house with Lego.

Wow, that looks like a lot of really cool stuff. Might have to get back in a python kind of mood, this really looks impressive, especially the c++ extensions.

I think the Maya thing is hyperbole, I just couldn't justify the price tag after I got out of school, but it's still def a standard.

But really, as much as I like blender and open source, you hit the nail on the head, Houdini is on another level of awesomeness. Basically functional modelling done right.

I just wish that it had as good of tools for NURBS as it does for polygons, but at that point it basically becomes Rhino/Grasshopper, and that's not really what Houdini's for. I also kind of wish that VEX wasn't a thing, I don't really want to have to learn an entire mini language to get into the guts. I try to do all of that in VOPs unless it gets complicated.

no carried interest talk, which is alright by me, that actually makes sense in giving an incentive for risk. would be interested to see if the 10% hit on monetary repatriation works, that could have some serious effects if that much multinational money gets sucked out of europe and abroad.

There are FPGAs (mostly Microsemi) that use internal flash memory to hold their configuration, but you are correct, most use eeproms/