RandomOpinion

Gell-Mann ammnesia.

Both were by Gearbox, IIRC, probably best known recently for the Borderlands series.

I would say in addition. Black Mesa has rather uneven difficulty which detracts from the experience.

Black Mesa is beautifully done but combat is not as well balanced as the original game; there are odd spikes in difficulty at certain points that will have you cursing.

Players new to the series would be better served by playing the original Half-Life than Black Mesa.

older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory ... FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired.

The FAANG companies and other technology platform companies have separate technical and management career tracks. Only those who want to be managers become managers.

A perfect vacuum is a perfect insulator.

If that were true, vacuum tubes (used for radio and early computers) wouldn't work.

Email works just fine for that.

The homebrew RFID tags in the articles you link to are LF (125-134 kHz) RFID tags.

The ones described in the video are UHF (860-960 MHz) RFID tags, which differ considerably in design and protocol.

Compilers, embedded systems and similar low level work, reverse engineering where you don't have the binary (e.g. malware), and that kind of thing.

There's the ACM and IEEE already though?

Or you could argue that it originated with Unix coming out of Bell Labs and being passed around universities on reels of tape, with new extensions contributed along the way.

That was not motivated at all by the open source movement. The only reason AT&T Bell Labs didn't charge a significant amount for UNIX is because they were under a consent decree which precluded them from entering other industries at the time, see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-...

Perhaps use the pattern used by rotary encoders? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_encoder#Ways_of_encodin...

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc5hIxdCMZ0 for a visual example.

Didn't Star Trek essentially pioneer the concept of technobabble?

Hell, no. Technobabble has been a staple of science fiction all the way back to its origins.

I kind of expect that the "let consumers be the beta testers and fire all our QA" approach is going to majorly bite them in the ass at some point and lose a lot of goodwill.

I wish I could agree with you. However, the QA layoffs at Microsoft were in 2014; if something like was going to happen, it would have happened by now.

Nice to see some competition in this space.

For those curious, the Xeon Ds are designed for low-power servers; one can get a 8 core/16 hyperthread D-1541 that has a TDP of 45W. Makes for a nice home server but Intel has been charging a lot for them. AMDs offering will hopefully be a good alternative that's more reasonably priced.

I guess what I'm saying is that by allowing a device to upgrade in software to more power-efficient designs, you might claw back some of the efficiency lost by using an FPGA when you consider the entire product's lifetime.

That presumes you put in a big enough FPGA/CPU or whatever fifteen(!) years in advance that has enough resources to handle the increased processing requirements for a future protocol (expensive and wasteful and there's no guarantee that you didn't guess wrong and it's still too small/slow) and that your RF signal path was designed well enough to handle the new signal requirements (expensive and wasteful even if you were prescient enough to guess what future requirements were). And that's on top of the fact that inexpensive electronic devices simply aren't built with components rated to last 15 years.

tl;dr software doesn't change the laws of physics

There wasn't any real reason to use the 80186 in a PC; it was meant for embedded devices. The only major feature that it had was some additional hardware for timers and DMA built in. Everything else was (more or less) architecturally the same as the 8086.

Probably the last series of 80186 PCs ever made were HP's 100LX / 200LX, a palmtop DOS based PDA that was released in the mid-'90s IIRC. It was an amazing little gadget for its time.

Seems to be based on this paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3089523

There appears to also be presentation slides for a preview of this paper at: https://siepr.stanford.edu/system/files/FITZPATRICK_Age62mor.... Apparently, the effect is not that large; ~2% jump in mortality rates for males and ~1% for females.

The functioning of chemistry in individual cells definitely are influenced by quantum effects.

So? Transistors used in modern computers directly depend on quantum effects (semiconductor physics was an outgrowth of QM) as well, yet we do not need to take into account QM when writing software or designing microprocessors.

I'm not sure why you think the underlying physics is deterministic.

If conclusive evidence were found that human consciousness is fundamentally dependent on QM processes to function, that would be a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery. Aside from some minor papers exploring the topic, no such evidence has been found AFAIK.

"HPE straps AMD chip into 2P/2U server box with Epyc results" - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/21/hpe_brings_amds_epy...

"Microsoft Announces Azure VMs with Dual 32-core AMD EPYC CPUs" - https://www.anandtech.com/show/12116/amd-and-microsoft-annou...

Wouldn't be surprised to see an equivalent AWS announcement soon, either.

They pretty much dominate mobile OSes, they have the top used browser, they dominate email

There's no direct value in any of those. Google gets very little direct revenue from the things you list nor could they ever hope to transform any of them a significant revenue source in the event their primary revenue stream (ads) went into a downturn.

Visual Capitalist has a set of pie charts that show the breakdown of revenue streams for 5 of the top tech giants, including MS, Google, Amazon, etc. that illustrate exactly what you're talking about: http://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-5-tech-giants-make-bil...

Google is poorly diversified and even Amazon is not as well diversified as one might think.

At the other companies I've worked for, you were expected to come to the meeting having read the docs sent over email.

It may be expected but large numbers of people don't do it. The 20 min. thing is a bit odd but I can see how it could be a net positive.

Except every vendor doesn't. By some magic voodoo witchcraft, x86 remains consistently capable of producing a single kernel that can run on anything from Intel or AMD.

The "magic voodoo witchcraft" is Microsoft's "Hardware Compatibility Specifications for Windows".

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/com...

Linux and the other free OSes run on commodity x86 hardware by targeting the same Microsoft-issued specification. There is no standards body or other neutral organization that defines what an x86 PC is.

If you're carrying it physically on your person daily, I have yet to see anything better than Leatherman's Skeletool. It's light (5.0 oz), has the core tools (a rather sharp knife with quick-access mechanism, pliers / wirecutter, and a bitdriver with a philips/flat bit built in) which covers the most common situations one is likely to encounter, both on a daily basis and in an emergency. There's also a bit set and and extension available as accessories.

The lighter tools generally are missing one or more of the above and the larger tools are A) significantly heavier and B) contain tools that aren't that useful on a daily basis (e.g. file, saw) and aren't really all that good IMO when you do need them.

See anyone you can think of from the 60s and 70s like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

Ken Thompson had a MS in EE/CS and Dennis Ritchie had degrees in both physics and mathematics, all of which are far more difficult than programming. Most of the other great names of the '60s/'70s have similar backgrounds, invalidating your point.

Do they have the work ethic and professionalism to continue to do so?

It is a rare person who has enough work ethic to force themselves to use their own free time to improve in a field they don't have any passion for. If that weren't so, we'd see a lot more self-taught physicists, mathematicians, and other STEM people.

The vast majority of people, including those who excel at their respective fields, don't love their jobs.

People who excel in their fields don't love their jobs? As kids nowadays say, "[citation needed]".

How do you make sure that everyone understand that that equipment belongs to you and not The Company?

For BYOD laptops/PCs, keep the receipt (which will usually include the serial number) and store a photocopy at the office in a place where you can easily keep track of it. If it's something shipped direct from the manufacturer, keep the box with the shipping label on it as additional evidence. You can also let your manager know that you have equipment that you personally own on-premises and give him an itemized list with serial numbers. For small items like mice, keyboards, etc., they're generally not worth enough to lose sleep over if lost.

Beyond that, the general rule of never bringing anything to work you're not willing to lose applies. Just like any other kind of BYOD device, your employer is not going to reimburse you if your personal hardware is stolen or accidentally damaged, so take appropriate precautions.

Lastly, make sure that you secure _and_ backup data on your hardware at least as well as your IT team does for company issued hardware. Your manager is not going to be at all sympathetic if you lose work due to a hardware failure on your BYOD device or due to malware.

I've happily brought equipment purchased at my own expense to work. It amortizes down to very little over the lifetime of the hardware (even a $1600 workstation laptop amounts to roughly $0.25 per hour over 3 years at 40 hours a week) and makes work so much more efficient (always a plus at performance review time) and just plain more pleasant.