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Submission + - SPAM: TSMC founder says China's semiconductor industry still five years behind. 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “Mainland China has given out subsidies to the tune of tens of billions of US dollars over the past 20 years but it is still five years behind TSMC,” Chang said. “Its logic chip design capability is still one to two years behind the US and Taiwan. The mainland is still not yet a competitor.”

In his speech, Chang also took a swipe at US chip giant Intel, describing its recent decision to enter the contract chip making market as “very ironic” because it turned down an opportunity to invest in TSMC more than three decades ago. Contract chip makers like TSMC typically take orders from so-called fabless chip makers like Qualcomm, which design their products but outsource the manufacturing.

Chang said he was rejected by Intel when he approached it for funding in 1985. “In the past, Intel was the alpha sneering at us and thought that we would never get big,” he said. “They never thought the business of [outsourced] wafer fabrication would become so important today.”

Chang said the US is also at a disadvantage compared with Taiwan because it lacks engineers dedicated to the semiconductor manufacturing sector, adding that the “US level of dedication to manufacturing was absolutely no match for that of Taiwan”.

“What I need right now are capable and dedicated engineers, technicians and operators. And they have to be willing to throw themselves into manufacturing,” he said. “In the US, doing manufacturing isn’t popular. It hasn’t been popular for decades.”
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Submission + - Faulty software lands postmasters and postmistresses in prison. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: Today the UK will Court of Appeal will issue its ruling on A group of 42 sub-postmasters and postmistresses will learn later whether convictions for stealing money will be quashed amid a Post Office IT scandal.

This case has been rumbling on for over a decade Post Office scandal: What the Horizon saga is all about

As a software geek, the part I find most troubling is that blind faith that those in authority placed in the software without proper accounting. Accounting systems and Software are deterministic, well they should be. IFF the system/software worked correctly this missing money must have shown up somewhere. Software defects are always traceable. It might be expensive and time consuming but persistence will win in the end. Somebody somewhere is responsible for this and defacto framing of these people is criminal in principle, if not in law.

Submission + - Autopilot lie exposed by consumer reports. (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Rei_is_a_dumbass
Rei_is_a_dumbass writes: Elon Musk has tweeted that "data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled." Tesla defenders also insisted that Autopilot couldn't have been active because the technology doesn't operate unless someone is in the driver's seat. Consumer Reports decided to test this latter claim by seeing if it could get Autopilot to activate without anyone in the driver's seat.

It turned out not to be very difficult.

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