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Submission + - NVIDIA sues Qualcomm and Samsung seeking to ban import of Samsung phones 2

Calibax writes: NVIDIA has filed complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm at the ITC and in Delaware, alleging that the companies are both infringing NVIDIA GPU patents covering technology including programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing. NVIDIA is seeking damages and a ban on US import of a raft of devices with Snapdragon and Exynos processors until there is an agreement on licensing.
Networking

T-Mobile To Throttle Customers Who Use Unlimited LTE Data For Torrents/P2P 147

New submitter User0x45 writes: Here's a nicely transparent announcement: "T-mobile has identified customers who are heavy data users and are engaged in peer-to-peer file sharing, and tethering outside of T-Mobile’s Terms and Conditions (T&C). This results in a negative data network experience for T-Mobile customers. Beginning August 17, T-Mobile will begin to address customers who are conducting activities outside of T-Mobile’s T&Cs." Obviously, it's not a good announcement for people with unlimited plans, but at least it's clear. T-mobile also pulled the backwards anti-net neutrality thing by happily announcing 'Free Streaming' from select music providers... which is, in effect, making non-select usage fee-based.

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.

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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