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Comment Re:Whoa (Score 4, Informative) 513

Apple was one of the founders of ARM. An ARM license doesn't cost them very much at all.

Manufacturing chips on the scale of Apple's iPhone means the cost per chip is relatively low. The NRE is done; at that point the more you can manufacture the cheaper it is per unit. Certainly paying Intel to manufacture chips and sell them (even at the margin that Apple can command) is going to be more expensive for Apple.

As for benefits... Apple has always wanted to own the whole shebang. They get to know ahead of time what the schedule's going to be, they get to dictate the chip's abilities, and they already have the design capability in-house. I *think* it'll be cheaper for Apple, with lower thermals and higher efficiencies with potentially a better designed chip. Whether the user sees benefits from that is up for debate.

There are certainly issues with compatibility and emulation, and I don't have a good answer for that. I suspect, if Apple go ahead and do it, they will have a good-enough answer for a transition. As for recompiling etc., they'll just require an ARM64 variant of any app in the app-store for a year or so ahead of any transition in order to be listed. That'll be sufficient IMHO to get almost everyone on-board.

Comment Yup, me. (Score 4, Interesting) 371

I am older, as the summary suggests - I'll be 49 this year, but these days I do:

  • verilog code on the FPGA, which talks to the
  • embedded micro (If there isn't one in the verilog or a hard macro on the FPGA), which is controlled by
  • the board-management micro, which talks to
  • the thunderbolt or lightning connector, which needs a
  • custom PCIe driver kernel extension on the host box (Mac or Linux), which wants a
  • user-interface library that applications will use to talk to the kext, and I provide a
  • GUI or shell app that exercises the hardware, and sometimes a
  • Full-blown application with complex threaded user-interaction which often needs
  • GPU accelerated display routines, which often use
  • OpenCL or Cuda routines for the heavy lifting

I don't think of myself as a "full-stack developer", I just think of myself as a developer. The goal is to solve problems, the more tools you have at your disposal the better.

Comment Re:There's a reason (Score 3) 174

I like that. *I* need to read...

From the same link: "Analyst Gene Munster said the Apple Watch represents just 3 percent of Apple's revenue, which would equal $1.6 billion during the quarter"

They have not undershot estimates - the watch has posted 50% increases in sales for 3 quarters running. I don't know of many products that do that.

And you're still ignoring the point I was making. Just on its own, the watch is the equivalent of a Fortune-500 company. Your original statement was "They (sic) is no money in that market". It is *you*, sir, who are wrong; in every respect.

Comment Re:There's a reason (Score 5, Informative) 174

The reason Qualcomm doesn't give a flying fuck about smart watches is because no one is buying them.
If google etc wanted one so badly they could order custom designs, or make their own.
They is no money in that market.

Apple made $1.6B in the last quarter on their watches. The segment "Apple wearables" is equivalent to a Fortune-500 company in its own right

From: https://qz.com/973920/apple-aa...

There was a steady increase in the unit’s sales in the first year the Watch was on sale, rising from $1.7 billion at the start of the year to $4.35 billion by the end. Other products cooled off in 2015, but saw another strong holiday quarter. This time, the business unit generated $2.87 billion, a jump of about 30% over the same quarter last year, but still relatively small compared with even Apple’s other non-iPhone businesses. Even so, Cook said its wearables business, which he defined as the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Beats headphones, was comparable to the size of a Fortune 500 company.

Sure, it's no iPhone-X, but it's hardly buttons either. My ole gran used to have a saying "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves", and the same applies writ large here.

Comment Re:"Average Reader?" (Score 4, Insightful) 99

*Looks at iPad*

In the last 3 years I've bought over 500 books, most of them in the 600-1200 (thanks Brandon) page length. That's not taking into account the thousands of books I've read prior to realizing I could carry around a library instead of a book or two by going digital. I could stock a good-sized bookshop with the books in the attic...

4600 seems pitifully small to me - I'm only about halfway (hopefully) through life and I'm already well past that.

Comment Displaying your ignorance (Score 1) 202

I "cashed out" a bitcoin last week, put down a 4x payment on my mortgage for this month.

You do realize that hundreds of millions of dollars are traded every day on the cryprocurrency exchanges, right ?

Go to coinbase.com (to pluck an example out of the air), log into your account. Do the 2FA thing with your cell phone. Type in how many btc or LTC or ETH you want to sell, wait a few days, and it appears in your bank account. It's easier than setting up a wire transfer...

Comment Re:Give me a break (Score 1) 128

Yes, but he's not agreeing with the summary, is he ? I knew reading comprehension on this site had declined, but I was hopeful it wasn't as bad as this...

Here's how it works.

1) A story is posted
2) Comments are made
3) Each comment can have a hierarchy of sub-comments. The text of any given comment is relative to its parent.

Just like this comment, calling your statement [the parent comment to this one] idiotic.

He was agreeing with his parent's comment, which is (rightly, IMHO) pointing out that Apple is actually going out of their way to make a fix they'd made (and QA'd with their hardware to work perfectly) *also* work with the non-Apple third-party hardware. This is Apple going above and beyond, and if you can't see that, well, that's more a problem with you than anything else.

And the douchebag that wrote the original clickbait, of course.

Comment Re: [not quite] Time To GTFO! (Score 2) 304

Or, you know, a shit-load of cash.

Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook (I think) amongst others are all in and around that area, and they pay very well. Sure, you'll be paying through the nose for a house/flat, but if you see yourself as having a career here, then that house/flat becomes an investment. Property values aren't likely to drop significantly in the next decade or so, in fact they're very likely to increase, so money put in now is likely a good return on investment.

Work, save, wait, quit, move.

That shitty $1M 1500-sq.ft ranch is now worth $1.5M and it'll still sell quickly, pay off your remaining $900k of mortgage and you're left with a pretty large nest egg to go live somewhere else. That's how it's worked out for me, anyway. I bought said shitty 1500 sq.ft house for $760k about 8 years ago, I get paid well, so I've been paying off the mortgage at 2x the monthly rate, and I now owe ~$300k. The house is worth ~$1.4M, Another 7-8 years and it's all mine.

There can be a plan, even in Silicon Valley. Just play the game and use the rules to your advantage.

Comment Re:Explanation (Score 4, Interesting) 237

TL;DR: Not really.

I'm guessing that's more of an "asset management system". Ours was orientated around the video. As cameras roll, we digitised the footage by tapping into the tape deck monitor output, we had RFID tags on each tape, and we had LTC/VITC timecode from the deck. We therefore had a unique reference for every frame laid down, as it was laid down (ie: there was zero ingest time, which was - and still is to a large extent - an issue with asset management systems).

The system then sent each frame to a centralised database server that had a webserver on it, and I wrote a streaming (ok, this part was in C :) server and a streaming player for Linux, Mac, and Windows that understood our custom streaming format. There wasn't anything complicated about the format, it was basically motion-JPEG data served from an HTTP interface, so the player would send the URL "http://asset-server/tape-rdid/timecode-from/timecode-to" and get an application/octet-stream back which was each file (common headers stripped), where a file was an individual frame in JPEG form.

What this let people do was record out in the desert, and have their digital dailies sent back via a satellite upload to home base via rsync, and the team at home base could "see" (we only supported quarter-res images at the time, the internet wasn't as fast as it is now) the footage, reliably locate frames on tapes, and discuss/annotate/create EDL (edit display-list, basically a set of timecode-timecode ranges) sequences and play around with it as if they had the tapes right there, even if it was at a low resolution.

On a more prosaic all-in-house system, the act of using a Discreet Inferno or Flame system (which controlled the tape decks in a post-production suite) would automatically log footage into our system, so the non-artist types could use our "virtual VTR" system to review and create play-lists which could then be sent to the machine room with the certainty that what they'd composed in their web-browser would be what ended up on the tape that would later be delivered to clients. This freed up a lot of the tape-deck use which could then be put to more profitable use by the post-house.

There was at least one time when I got a angry phone call from a client who claimed our system was screwing things up. They'd created their EDL for the client using our system and then sent the job to the tape room to be generated, and of course creating that new tape would automatically log the new footage into the system (because it was writing to a tape in a monitored tape deck). They looked at the output footage of the generated tape in their browser, and it wasn't right. After a bit of tracking things down, it turned out the tape room had inserted the wrong master tape, so we saved them the indignity/embarrassment of sending footage from a *competing* client out the door. That alone, in the eyes of the director, was worth the cost of the system.

We had similar procedures for rendered footage from 3D systems (Shake etc. at the time). Again, everything was collated into shots/scenes etc. on the database server. We had rules that would be applied to directories full of frames that would parse out sequences from arbitrary filenames that were differentiated only by a frame number in the filename. That's actually harder than it looks - there is *no* standard naming convention across post-houses :) I separated out the code into a library, wrote a small commandline utility called 'seqls' which was *very* popular for parsing out a directory of 10,000 files into a string like 'shot-id.capture.1-10000.tiff' ...

All of this is (I'm sure, I haven't kept up to date) commonplace today, but it was pretty revolutionary at the time. I'd say about 90% of the code was PHP, there were various system daemons in C, there were video players for the major platforms in C/C++ and there was a kernel driver for the linux box in C that handled the incoming video, digitised the audio, and digitised the LTC timecode (the audio timecode, the VITC timecode was on line 27 (?) of the video signal on every frame, and we decoded that as well in the kernel driver).

On top of that, I designed an audio circuit to take in the stereo balanced audio and de-balance it to a standard audio signal we could encode along with the video frames. More recently, and purely for fun, I re-designed the entire thing to be on a single board with an FPGA doing most of the work. One big-ass server and lots of cheap digitisers, it's amazing what you can do these days :)

That's a whistle-stop tour - I could go on and on, but the wife is calling me to do the dishes while she bathes the kid :)

Comment Re:Explanation (Score 4, Interesting) 237

15 years ago, Apple hired me on an H1B, and my starting salary was $140k, then they paid everything to convert my H1B to a green card. None of this includes joining and yearly bonus stock options (at the time, RSU's these days) or yearly cash bonuses. They also paid relocation and first few months of rent in a pre-arranged location.

I'm not special. There were several dozen of us in the (weekly) new-employee orientation meeting, most of whom were s/w engineers.

Oh, and I (or rather, my small company, that Apple bought) wrote ILM's digital asset management system for films like Star Wars (ep1), James Bond films, digital commercials etc. mostly in PHP. That sold for $40k/pop... Indeed, just like any language, it's possible to write crap code in PHP, but used properly it's a powerful tool.

Comment Image processing (Score 1) 111

When I started my PhD in image processing, I was given an 80-column, 24-line text terminal to the department microVax (approximately 1 MIP, shared between about 40 people). I was lucky, and got one of the good ones, it had an amber phospher :)

Seriously, the only place to see the results of the algorithm was on a shared display downstairs in the lab - which was in high demand. I ended up doing a lot of terminal-style graphs (mine wasn't a tektronix terminal, so I only had text-like characters) to prove an algorithm worked before actually seeing it.

And now I look at the technological ability of my freaking phone, and I wonder at just how far things have come in 30 years or so...

Government

Largest Auto-Scandal Settlement In US History: Judge Approves $15 Billion Volkswagen Settlement (usatoday.com) 128

A federal just has approved the largest auto-scandal settlement in U.S. history, a $14.7 billion settlement concerning Volkswagen Group's diesel car emissions scandal. USA Today reports: U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco approved the sweeping agreement between consumers, the government, California regulators and the German automaker in a written ruling a week after signaling he was likely to sign off. He said the agreement is "fair, reasonable and adequate." The settlement comes about a year after Volkswagen admitted that it rigged 11 million vehicles worldwide with software designed to dodge emissions standards. The company is still facing criminal investigations by the U.S. Justice Department and German prosecutors. The U.S. probe could lead to additional financial penalties and criminal indictments. About 475,000 Volkswagen owners in the U.S. can choose between a buyback or a free fix and compensation, if a repair becomes available. VW will begin administering the settlement immediately, having already devoted several hundred employees to handling the process. Buybacks range in value from $12,475 to $44,176, including restitution payments, and varying based on milage. People who opt for a fix approved by the Environmental Protection Agency will receive payouts ranging from $5,100 to $9,852, depending on the book value of their car. Volkswagen will also pay $2.7 billion for environmental mitigation and another $2 billion for clean-emissions infrastructure.

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