TSMC is neither software nor fabless. I'm not sure we are talking about the same company, there seems to be some disconnect here. For hardware business 30% margins are high, Apple is one of the most famous exceptions.
When a foundry wishes to raise capital from the private or public markets, it's bucketed under TMT - which includes software and fabless hardware as well.
This means it's almost impossible to raise capital without a near monopoly and/or government support and intervention - which is what Taiwan did for TSMC and UMC - because the upfront costs are too high and the margins are much lower compared to other subsegments in the same sector.
This is why industrial subsidizes like the CHIPS act are enacted - to minimize the upfront cost of some very CapEx heavy projects (which almost everything Foundry related is).
I'd be curious to see how many clock cycles something as simple as "x = y + z" (Where all three variables are integers) takes in various languages.
The compiled languages would likely output a single MOV and ADD and get done in 2 cycles (plus any time to fetch from memory). Something like Python probably takes a couple hundred with all its type checking. JIT languages I would think would take a couple hundred the first time the line gets executed, but then have a single MOV and ADD ready the next time, unless I'm completely misunderstanding JIT.
Absolutely. Imagine you are saving a text file to NAS with a super-secret password to your Bitcoin wallet, for example "password". While it was in memory before it reached disk, one bit was flipped and the file contents became "pastword" which OS happily saved on your RAID. And now you've lost your Bitcoins forever.
Teenage Engineering aren't the ones who would be acquired, they just did the industrial design work on contract for Rabbit. The same way TE designed the Playdate but it's not a TE product.
Anyone interested in demystifying TE should look at the PC case they designed. They sell polished turds, they just didn't polish that one enough for it not to stand out as a complete piece of crap.
This is pretty unfair. They sell sometimes pretty exclusively priced stuff like their field table - more than the case. But with these you are buying aesthetics. And i would much rather have case this cool looking if i had it in visible place. They are one of the few companies recognized for their design that is something AND their audio stuff might also be expensive but is really good.
I always loved playing adventures from Level 9 Computing [1], particularly The Worm in Paradise. At that time, no solutions were available, so there was a lot of trial and error involved. I played on Spectrum, and I remember being amazed at their graphics engine that managed to present a full-screen (well, technically a half-screen) illustration for every location in the game. There definitely wasn't enough memory for that, so they probably have used some generative algorithm.
Looking at the Level 9 interpreter sources from https://github.com/DavidKinder/Level9 it looks like the pre-bitmap games stored their images as little bytecode programs (with instructions for move, draw, fill, etc, plus a gosub opcode so you could have "draw the same complex shape several times", opcodes for reflecting and scaling, etc) -- check the getinstruction() function in level9.c.
So likely hand-composed, not generative algorithm, I think.
Correct, none. I use Pihole for blocking. But the bigger point I think is that security conscious users are hesitant to employ extensions in general, even if some folks are ok with a couple select extensions they are still spooked by the general field.
DNS blocking has not been effective for probably close to a decade, with domain-fronting, L7 adware/spyware, fingerprinting and other trickery. Parent comment correctly characterized the lack of UBO as a net security/privacy loss.
I wonder if the famous Interstellar's docking scene was inspired by this game mechanic. It's pretty much the same concept - you had to align yourself with the station first and then try to match the rotational speed. If the previous alignment step isn't perfect than during the rotation matching the entrance would wobble and make it impossible to dock. Docking was indeed as hard as it looks in Interstellar :)
When it was first introduced, it received frequent updates [1] but now it's been 2 months since the last update. So either Google is preparing some huge update (Gemini?), or Bard is going to disappear as a standalone product and instead will be absorbed into other products like Search, Docs, etc.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semicon...
reply