Posts by Tom 7 8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
I think were talking across each other. I've made 200u long gates on a 5u process so I doubt there is any difficulty in making a 20nm feature on a 7m process. However you probably couldn't make a flash even a 20nm work on the 7nm CPU process.
But I would never knowingly by a package that might contain an SSD with god knows what already on it and invisible to me and I hope no-one else would consider it an option either.
You can easily make things larger on a die than the minimum size. Whether you would want to given the technologies are not really compatible - you dont want to multilayer FLASH on a potentially hot CPU die. And I certainly wouldnt want an SSD on a device that MS had made - you'd never know what was on it that YOU couldn't see!
One of our 2 barn cats has gone walkies and is being courted by an old lady about 5 miles away who wants to keep it. She was grassed up by someone on FB so we have been trying to contact her to explain a few things to her but she refuses to answer the phone. We would like to warn her that on no circumstances is she to try and pick him up. I'm normally pretty good with animals but this one will rub against your legs a purr like a harley but touch his belly and he'll remove your arm,
We had a cat that would bring full grown live rabbits through the cat flap and terrorise them in the parquet floored dining room, which was also host to the upright piano. The rabbits used to get behind the piano and kick the shit out of the strings while screaming loudly. We have had guests flee our haunted house as a result. My room was right over the dining room and after the first occurrence I just used to ignore it and try not to tread on the skin with four paws and a pile of guts in the middle that was the only evidence of the night of terror.
We had a kitten we called Leper because its teeth and claws were so sharp it made bits drop off you. One morning I was making tea - cup in one hand and kettle in the other with a piece of toast in my mouth. He climbed up my jeans and then proceeded up my bare chest removed the toast and climbed back down before I had time to put the kettle or half filled cup down.
Password repetition time outs are really useful too. Many people are also amazed to discover most DBs include user access management which can prevent the wrong people doing the wrong things without too much difficulty.
"Sorry you cant do that unless your come into the office and sit at this PC"!
My experience of developing your own pictures to avoid questions from grown ups was curtailed when I was spooling the film onto the development cassette in total darkness only for it to be torn from my hands and shredded by the cat. The same cat who had broken my red light I used to use by lying on it until the glass overheated and cracked. I'm surprised its ghost doesnt appear on the few pictures I bother to take these days.
Liptons is weird. Anywhere in the world (probably even in India or China) a hotel or even cafe will offer you Lipton's tea bags and that milk in tin containers and no matter how you brew it or where you are the first sip will induce home sickness that would scare even Ford Prefect. And then the little cardboard tag will fall off the string and you daren't drink anymore in case you choke on the bag.
I'm 6'5 and I vaguely remember being forced to wear a hard hat to enter a machine room which of course resulted in my helmet smashing into a beam, flying off and causing serious havoc to machinery while I ended up prostrate as my body carried on as my head was bounced backwards. I never did ascertain why helmets had to be warn but have met many overzealous* safety officers.
*I dont blame them - without proper training your bound to overreact.
It is amusing when people park below the high tide line and get swamped. I recently parked some 250 yds and 20 ft up a hill from the high tide mark and went on a kids sports day trip by bus. It was a blustery day and I returned to find the wrack line (foam and seaweed) perfectly bisecting the gap between my front and rear axles and several of the people I had the day trip with spent time wandering around the council car park as their cars weren't where they left them.
Dont mess with the sea - its getting angrier!
TBF an update on the Pi4 takes a couple of minutes if that. I've some early Pis and Zeros that you can ignore for an hour or more after starting an update.
Top TIp - do vnc onto them once in a while though so you realise you've forgotten to remove Wolfram which needs a full universe cycle to download and install.
I've always thought IT should try and at least control what goes on with Excel in the company if anything useful goes on in it. I used to write VBA libraries of functions for use in Excel by our company accountant. That way when the DB changed I only had to change the function that accessed the data in the DB and not the 27 Excel programs he had that used that bit of data at month/years end. Its not the IT dept that puts up walls - its generally the Excel user whose inexperience in things like maintainability and backups and 'could get hit by a bus tomorrow' that are the ones hiding company IP and data in some rats nest of pages.
I remember the heady of days of office things on phones and tablets. People arriving at work having done all their work on the train on the way in and spending the rest of the day correcting what would have taken an hour to write from scratch on a large screen WIMP machine.
And the starlings were murmerating around the place and I was thinking if you could make an AI bird flock like that but take away the fun and replace it with protect this point here then you would have an almost impenetrable moving wall of (explosive) birds that would fill in any holes you made in it.
And then this article this morning! I'd not considered the attack possibilities but even without chemical weapons on board they seem pretty endless.
For spying purposes a few thousand mass produced and so potentially very cheap drones forming their own cloud (literally and computingly) swarming over a site would have a very high probability of returning some useful data on one or more of them.
Last year an AI came up with solutions for the 3 body problem 100 million times faster than 'normal methods'. Humans largely tend to work things out from first principles in a progressive way whereas AI can sometimes find links between input and output that may involve a surprising collapse of several layers of human struggle into something easily predictable over some limited domains. Its likely the folding AI will fail badly on many proteins and will have to be checked by F@H.
Humans being humans its likely out understanding of the reasons behind particular collapses which can drive science on in leaps and bounds will be held up by willy waving and the desire to be first to publish and, worse, patent.
Nowt wrong with an SP25 MK4 so long as you made sure to not use noisy graphite grease on the axle.
One thing I discovered on my journey through hi-fi was the ritual effect - simply going through a ritual changes your expectations of what you are going to hear - and you will hear a difference even if its exactly the bloody same. Double blind tests are good it you can but impossible on your own but simply bending over a cabinet pissing about with wires connecting up a new deck can cause the muscles on your neck to tire in a way that changes your hearing* more than sticking a new needle on a cartridge.
* seriously - I can wiggle my ears and that changes what I hear enormously. Most people do it subconsciously.
The trouble with FLAC is the act of decoding can potentially add jitter into the stream on playback unless run at high priority to prevent it getting slowed.Never heard it myself and I dare say just streaming the decompressed bit stream from disc to Dt2A also has that (lower) possibility. But I've got more than enough space on my system, to store a lifetime of uncompressed cd or above quality so I'll do that.
If you think TV speakers are shit you can buy a shit soundbar to augment it. I think the reason why no-one makes good soundbars is because if they actually worked below 100 hz or so the screen would visibly shake. I plug mine into some old 60s hifi and friends of my kids with indoor cinema shit are gobsmacked.
And as for CD being odd it works - no one has ever managed to tell if anything non-compressed higher quality or rate is indeed different from CD in a double blind test.
I've written a couple of online shops and customer support db apps and a db app document/security controller with it around the turn of the millennium. Not been near it since - I found I had to write a few functions to wrap it to prevent it doing PHP things but I found the ASP approach far easier to manage and maintain than Django or Flask even with bizarre PHP quirks. Its so much easier to interface the server with the client when most of the code is on the same file and screen.
I may pop back and see if the new version solves a couple of problems that worried me about the language 15 years ago as I have a particular fondness for ASP that even VB didnt put me off.
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