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Submission + - Class action lawsuit against AMD and executives (yahoo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Plaintiffs have filed a class action lawsuit against AMD and some executives alleging fraud and violations of the Securities Exchange Act.

Submission + - Previously-Unseen Photos of Challenger Disaster Appear Online (io9.com)

Nerval's Lobster writes: Twenty-six photos of the space shuttle Challenger disaster have appeared online. According to io9, "Michael Hindes of West Springfield, MA, was sorting through boxes of his grandparents' old photographs when he happened upon 26 harrowing photos of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster of 1986. To his knowledge, these photos have never been publicly released." Hindes told the Website that the photographer was "a friend of his grandfather, who worked for NASA as an electrician on the Agency's hulking, spacecraft-schlepping crawler transporters." Someone at Reddit (which also has a lengthy thread devoted to the images) also threw together a GIF of the liftoff and subsequent explosion.

Submission + - Texas public charter schools teach creationism (slate.com)

SeattleGameboy writes: Slate has a fascinating expose on teaching materials used by one of the largest public charter schools in Texas. Not only are they disputing evolution and teaching creationism, but they also twist world history, denigrates feminism and sexual orientation.

With so many tech companies basing their operations in Texas, on wonders how you can find enough workers with critical reasoning skills.

Submission + - AMD Executives sued (rgrdlaw.com)

An anonymous reader writes: AMD executives, including Rory Read and Lisa Su, are being sued for securities fraud in relation to misleading statements about Llano, Trinity, and the company's desktop business.

Comment Re:Engineers? (Score 2) 226

The idea that a SAPR (Synthesis, Auto Place & Route) flow is fundamentally inferior to a full-custom layout is tenuous at best. It's really just a new parroting of the good-old days cliché.

Modern gate-mapping, placement, and routing algorithms are quite sophisticated these days (and improving all the time), and computers are incredibly fast, relative to a human mind. Could a really good layout engineer do a full-custom 64b carry-lookahead adder that is smaller, faster, less power than an automated flow? Maybe. But how long is it going to take him to do the whole FPU? Or how about a complex block with upwards of 1M logic gates? Hand-layout for digital logic has rapidly diminishing returns, in my opinion. Better to have your layout guys do some awesome stdcells, and let the tools and PD wizards do the rest. In many cases, it'll be just as fast (if not faster) than the full-custom option. Note well that automated flows don't explicitly demand random/non-structured P&R algorithms.

Comment Re: good ground connection (Score 1) 341

Not an electrician, but I thought a Ufer ground was basically required by NEC these days(??). Basically, just put it in the foundation footer, or slab for slab-on-grade, and you've got a really good local ground for the house (concrete is a pretty good conductor, relative to dirt). Making sure all the utilities enter the building in roughly the same area, all with short-as-possible low-resistance connections to the ground goes a long way too.

Comment Re:open salary discussion (Score 1) 402

Yup... I posted this before: comment from 2008.

And for the curious... The salary ranges that I posted have basically been increased ~2% (cumulative) over the intervening 4 years (2007 range vs 2011 range), and average employee salary probably increased ~5% (also cumulative), based on data I've seen from HR. Also, no, my company's HR department isn't refreshingly transparent. They're just completely clueless...

Comment Re:Comparison of technologies (Score 1) 624

Hmmm... not sure if it was the "official" way to deal with a child's passport, but when I was a kid, my mom printed my name, wrote "Signed by mother" above my name, and signed her own. I traveled all over Europe, to Egypt, Canada, the US with that passport. No one paid it any particular attention. But that seems so much more sane, in my biased mind, than having small kids sign it themselves.

Comment Re:Adobe complaining about bloat? (Score 1) 477

Indeed... and the relevant metric here is latency, not bandwidth. I guess really good ping times are in the 15-30ms range. So assuming the server is close (in terms of network topology), and that the server has the required data in memory, such that disk latency is 0ms on the server end, that's still going to be noticeably slower than loading data from the local disk for many (most?) users.

Comment Re:What happens when people change their minds.. (Score 1) 299

I honestly think some people have no usable perspective on how large their car is, or where it is within the space of the road as they're driving. Stopping so far back illustrates that they don't really know where the front end of their car is, so they're likely stopping such that they can see the stop line (probably with some arguably-excessive margin) beyond the hood of their vehicle.

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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis

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