Then it was given away to GlobalFoundries, who ran out of cash trying to take IBM's 7nm process in to HVM and gave up on being a leading edge fab. IBM sued GF for this.
IIRC, the GF 7nm process was rumoured to have the best specs vs. Intel, TSMC and Samsung.
> The current waiting lists for new grid connections are on the order of a decade.
There's a number of projects in the connection queue that are speculative - in many cases, people applying for a connection, then sitting on it to resell. Thankfully, a lot of these "zombie" projects are getting ejected from the queue due to some recent reforms, so we might see those 10+ year connection dates move down.
The logo got a second lease of life after NeXT was acquired by Apple. A bit of British political trivia: Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the Vote Leave organisation in the 2016 Brexit referendum, nicked the NeXT logo and made a few tweaks for Vote Leave:
> The logo was stolen from Steve Jobs. We couldn’t afford to hire a top agency and they wouldn’t have worked with us anyway. So I thought about Jobs’ advice on simplicity and ‘the best artists steal’ (see above!) and did some google searches. Surely there’s something he did with manic determination I could steal? After he left Apple in the 1980s, for his new company he got one of the top designers in the world to do a logo. I looked at it and thought, ‘good enough for Steve good enough for us, we can put a hole in the top so it looks like a ballot box’. Total cost: almost nothing. I made a lot of decisions like this because the savings in time and money were far greater than the marginal improvements of spending more time and money on them (if this would even bring an improvement).
I think there’s probably a bit of survivorship bias here — we know if this anecdote because the ballot box concept is actually quite good. But of course there are other “rip offs” that are bad (blonic the hedgehog?). The idea to make a small change was clever imo, but doesn’t guarantee a great design. I think the ballot box design was either “lucky” or “inspired”, perhaps without the creator even realizing it.
Dominic Cummings is an absolute mastermind, to a scary degree. One of those people, like Steve Jobs, who I can't help be awed by. Almost as if I live on a lower plane of existence to them
I explored the law. Cutting a long story short I figured out a way in which one could (legally) hire someone to pop around to Gould’s house in the middle of the night and go through his bins the night before bin day. For roughly a year I read many documents from the Blair inner circle including notes from Blair. Many of them were market research about the euro. I saw Gould writing memos for Blair who would try out ideas (remember ‘the bridge between Europe and America’?) then Gould tested the results. I tried to counter these moves but, obviously, without being able to tell people that my ‘hunches’ about what Blair was up to were not hunches. For a few thousand quid a month I had a window into the Government’s secret plans.
the joke is, "the 2nd best day of your life is the day you buy your boat" which makes the listener think "2nd? oh, must be after your wedding/birth of child"
and then you say "the 1st best day is when you sell it"
Yeah, I seem to remember the full phrase is something like, “Advice for millionaires: if it floats, flies, or [fornicates], rent it.” Advice does not apply to billionaires, which is a category Mike Lynch may have snuck into depending on whose reporting you believe.
As distasteful as the last part of that advice it, I can see the sense of the rest of it. You need to have enough money that the inevitably high ongoing maintenance costs (and I guess depreciation) simply aren’t a concern, or even something you have to think about because you have people to take care of it for you.
Bottom paint is about $250/gal. It takes us about half a day to sand the hull and roll on a layer. My 40' sailboat can be covered with 1 generous coat with 1gal with a little left over. $7k for bottom paint must either be a huge boat, an expensive crew, or both. It's just not all that expensive if you're willing to put in a little effort.
I’m no boat expert but doesn’t your statement imply some level of ease of dragging a boat out of the water to perform this operation? Something tells me that pulling a 40 foot sailboat out of the water, turning it over, painting it, and returning it into the water isn’t necessarily the most straightforward operation. A lot of complexity is probably loaded into “it takes us” and if we took a gander at the hourly rates of everyone involved in said operation as well as the upfront cost of the equipment to perform said operation as well as the safety measures required to execute the operation properly I feel like we would be a lot closer to the $7k number than the $250 number
You just take the boat to the travel lift and it hoists out pretty easy.
Under 1 or 2 boat bucks for in/out lift, dry storage, and paint if you DIY is reasonable for smaller vessels, like under 30’.
The tough part is scheduling and finding a boatyard if there’s not one close.
If you don't enjoy working on boats owning one sure would get expensive. I guess I'm lucky in that I don't have to pretend? Sure beats office politics, I wish it paid nearly as well as computers.
This can be done for free by just beaching the boat and working during low tide. Although that can be illegal nowadays in some places. Plus a 40 foot boat is much larger than required for cruising anywhere you want- if your boat fits on a trailer it is not only easy to paint, but probably can get by without any.
I didn't factor in haul out and storage because that's a separate thing from bottom paint. Haul out and transport costs about $1k/yr and storage cost over the winter is a further $1k.
Hourly labor rates are $0, I share ownership with 2 other people and we all pitch in.
If you're an engineer, I'm just going to x3 to x10 that time estimate to come to something realistic, just like I do with the engineers at work.
That way it includes going to buy the paint and sandpaper, putting the boat in a drydock or otherwise on land, finding and dragging out the tools and getting power to them, drying the boat, cleaning it, eating, toilet breaks, taping off the edges etc, letting the paint dry, cleaning up everything afterwards, putting the boat back into the water and probably tons more that I missed.
It depends. For example, if the previous paint contains environmentally harmful compounds, you can not sand it without the infrastructure to collect the dust. The details depend on the location (regulation), but typically you need to hire this out.
Sanding takes multiple person-days and can be the wrong method (depending on details). Media blasting (like soda) is much preferred but requires machines and infrastructure to collect the run-off. In ideal situations, sanding is not necessary at all.
It can be several boat bucks, or just about a hundred dollars. It depends.
It does contain harmful compounds. It wouldn't work to prevent growth otherwise. You use a random orbit sander hooked up to a shop vac just like when you sand anything else (unless you prefer dust going everywhere).
For a 40' sailboat it doesn't take multiple person days, it takes about a quarter of a person day. More if you really have to take off a lot of layered up material. And you're right, blasting would work better in that case.
> It does contain harmful compounds. It wouldn't work to prevent growth otherwise.
Nowadays there exists bottom paints such as polysiloxane based ones that work by creating a very hard and smooth surface that critters find it very hard to attach to, rather than poisoning them.
There are levels of toxicity. For some old paints, allowing the dust or run-off from pressure washing to touch the ground would be violating some regulation. Removing those old paints is more complicated. They need to be removed completely and cleanly, so sanding is a bad choice.
This isn't the case for any paint now purchasable, but most still contain biocides that you want to avoid for your own health when cleaning or sanding.
7k$ is about what yards quoted for such a job in NorCal. It's easy to DIY if you know what to do, but (1) it's a nasty job (2) it's toxic (3) it takes time and (4) you still end up paying about 2k$ if you're thrifty (in NorCal). I both hired and DIYd the job and it's a wash as to whether one prevails over the other. If I were doing nothing else but boating fulltime, I'd DIY it. But I have a job and family.
Hi, 45' boat owner here. Steps are pull the boat out by travel lift and block it. Power wash the bottom. Put up dust barrier. Don tyvek suit and mask. Sand with dust hose. Power wash the bottom. Paint first coat. Dry. Paint Second coat. Dry. Lift boat move blocking pads. Paint pad area. Dry. Paint Second coat. Dry. Launch boat by travel lift. Paint is $320 per gallon I need 2 gallons and a quart. Total time is 2 days if they hustle, 3 if the pull is late in the day. Lucky for me, they have not found blisters or any thing that takes fiberglass work, that adds time.
Last time I had it done it was $6450 including tax. 7 boat bucks.
Your process, while undeniably more correct than mine, is substantially more involved. Mine goes like this:
1. In the fall, drive the boat onto the hauler's trailer, unstep the masts, and transport it to the yard. Place on blocks and pressure wash.
2. Winterize the boat, wait for spring.
3. In the spring, break out the shop vac and sander and sand the hull. Since it's a multi season ablative paint, don't sand it all off--just enough to smooth it out and get the dried, hard top layer off.
4. Roll on a coat of paint.
5. When the truck arrives to splash the boat, slap some paint on the spots where the stands' pads were, and where the blocks were under the keel.
6. Step and rig the masts.
7. Splash the boat and go sailing.
Steps 3-7 take place on two consecutive days, along with a bunch of other maintenance activities.
I find sailing to be a fun low cost, sometimes even slightly profitable hobby… I own a very small (17 foot) cruising sailboat I maintain myself and get endless fun for less than the average teenager spends on a cell phone. It has an even smaller sailing dinghy/tender I built myself from old redwood fence planks. It would be the last thing I would sell even if destitute- because although small I could live on it for free, and can also use it to get fresh seafood for free- not to mention traveling without fuel!
(to paraphrase Sterling Hayden) my body is only about 6ft long… I sleep as well and have just as much fun on a 17 foot boat as I would on a 184ft boat- and despite being small mine is much more seaworthy than Bayesian was.
My one concern is that nano-texture apple displays are a little more sensitive to damage, and even being super careful with my MBPs I get the little marks from the keyboard when you carry the laptop with your hand squeezing the lid and bottom (a natural carry motion).
A piece of paper also kind of works, but it's a bit ridiculous to constantly keep that around with you and try to reach 95% consistency. Eventually I stopped trying because it was just more infrastructure to protect the thing than I'd prefer.
Love the nano-texture on the Studio Display, but my MacBooks have always suffered from finger oil rubbing the screen from the keys. Fingerprint oil on nano-texture sounds like a recipe for disaster.
For my current laptop, I finally broke down and bought a tempered glass screen protector. It adds a bit of glare, but wipes clean — and for the first time I have a one-year-old MacBook that still looks as good as new.
I put a thin screen cleaner/glasses cleaner cloth on the keyboard whenever I close the lid. That keeps the oils off the screen as well as prevents any pressure or rubbing from damaging the glass.
Radio waves travel at nearly the speed of light, whereas light in an fiber optic cable travels at ~67% of the speed of light due to the refractive index of glass.
In a vacuum, electro-magnetic waves travel at a speed of 3.336 microseconds (μs) per kilometer (km). Through the air, that speed is a tiny fraction slower, clocking in at 3.337 μs per km, while through a fiber-optic cable it takes 4.937 μs to travel one kilometer – this means that microwave transport is actually 48% faster than fiber-optic, all other things being equal.
I worked for three years designing custom low-latency point-to-point microwave radios for HFT for this very reason. They didn't need very high bandwidths (their long-haul network was less than 200 Mbit, whereas in New York/New Jersey we had about 5 Gbps because the hops were much shorter and they had licenses for more RF bandwidth at a higher frequency).
At those time scales, the difference is so large, it was incredible what they were willing to pay to build these networks!
I somewhat regret not specialising in RF/comms in my EE degree - this side of HFT sounds like a fascinating line of work (Trading at the Speed of Light was a great read).
I doubt there's much here that's cutting edge. Any digital processing that's done in typical radio's to correct for channel impairments is avoided as it just adds latency. Meanwhile LTE is using as many digital techniques as possible to maximize bandwidth (MIMO, HARQ, OFMDA)
Haha, you got us :) - in terms of the digital side yes, kind of. We’d even try to not have any digital in the path if possible on some hops! We did have things like LDPC (and different FEC on control packets) but it was definitely not as complex as LTE or newer cellular or WiFi standards. But what was avoided digitally meant far more work going into the analogue side to improve SNR, dynamic range, NPR etc. through the signal chain.
Yes, even in single mode fibers light is bouncing around between the layers of glass with different diffraction indicies. The pulses just aren't dispersing while doing so.
IIRC, the GF 7nm process was rumoured to have the best specs vs. Intel, TSMC and Samsung.
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