Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1. Amazing. It brings to mind that if there were a clear profit to be made on fusion reactors, there would probably be a portable plug-in model by now (Mr. Fusion). Money crosses all kinds of bridges.
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  2. even mechanical machines suffer damage.When the working babbage difference engine replica was shipped to california, the shippers also dropped it, resulting in many parts of it no longer functioning.
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  3. They have a new technology, you find a river, go upriver until you find a valley, which rivers tend to make, then place a dam there and let the river water fill it. Cheap and easy. Ok, maybe not that new...
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  4.  @bighands69  There was an article some years ago on it in the Wall Street Journal during the war with Serbia (yes, that old). The issue was the fired rounds, on hitting the target, sprayed outwards and even into the air.
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  5. My cut rate car from Japan was a Miata. My father had a Porsche 911, but I didn't have that kind of money. The Miata was my Porsche. I did that again with a Tesla M3.
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  6. The old near line storage was tape. I went from Seagate to working on tape drives, because as big as HDDs were getting, there was a need for more storage to archive data. But tape was continually in a race for capacity, with disk drives nipping at their heels. Eventually, arrays of cheap disk drives simply turned into the long term storage solution as well, so they wiped out the market for tape and optical disks as well. I recall the words my old boss at Micropolis said to me when, as a brash 19 year old, I read about optical disks and said to him "optical disks are going to replace our magnetic disks". He told me then that magnetic data could easily surpass optical disks since they were limited by the wavelength of light. That was the late 1970s, and it came true. Will disk drives come to a complete halt? It seems unlikely. HDDs have a use going on into the future for large, cheap storage.
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  7. Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors Give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah - Paul Simon
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  8. Feel free to refer to it as a "stored program computer". I don't believe in giving credit where none is due, and you previously issued a video acknowledging that Von Neumann did not, in fact, come up with the stored program concept.
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  9. So you are saying the idea sank? Sorry. Why not treat the iceberg water as... well, water. Oil tankers are some of the biggest ships on the seas. One could be converted to store water instead, then you go to the icebergs and lay two pipes to the middle of one, the first that pumps heated water to it, and the second that intakes the water, both the heated water and the melt water. You'd be creating a meltwater lake in the middle of large iceberg. You'd give it up after the iceberg went unstable. Basically it would be converting oil energy to water, much like desalination, but presumably cheaper, since the source was fresh water to begin with. The result would be a taker of fresh water, that would then sail home.
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  10. Gonna cross the big half million I see. I've been watching since less than 100k. Congratulations.
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  11. Congratulations on crossing 200k!
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  12. Yea, you have to go microwave before skin effect takes over. Like gigahertz.
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  13. What is the frequency of the sun, anyways?
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  14. How do you tell an artificial diamond? Its too perfect. That means the diamond mining industry is on its way out.
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  15. Intel did good, they sold us second rate architectures for decades. But with the lapse of "king PC" the X86 arch is slowly falling. Intel had their chance to get into the ARM business and they punted it. They could take over RISC-V by simply showing up, but they won't do that either. They have literally tied themselves to the X86, and they will go down with it.
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  16. And thus I offend the disciples of the religion of AI. And thus it is -- As the video says, the Google software is light on details. Much of AI, with some digging, is found to be conventional algorithms dressed up as AI. I have had a 50+ year career, and over and over again we have faced these "AI is around the corner" waves. Is it different this time? Certainly. The pay for AI experts has gone from nothing to a very high level. Formerly it was only academics. I'll apply "Franco's law" here: the "breakthroughs in AI could have been done by more conventional means, and if you look closely enough, probably are. Flame on!
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  17. "A/C systems are more economical than D/C".... welllll in old tech that was true. Transformers were easy to make, power came out of the generator in A/C, and the most common use of the power in the early 1900s was motors that ran on A/C. Now fast forward to today. Your power plug shrank. What happened? Well, copper is expensive, so anything that shrinks that is cool. Plus, power is lost in the transformer, which was what was in that heavy brick that used to power your laptop. In addition, generally you use D/C power in most of your house now. All the electronics, those LED lightbulbs, etc. Yep, all D/C. Electronics came to the rescue. Turns out if you use high power, high (er) frequency (than A/C at 60/50 hz) you can do the same power conversion with way way (way) less copper or even no copper at all. Plus, it is way easier to perform high power conversion now, even at high voltages. Thus things are changing, rapidly. There is a good chance that many or even most lighting systems will go DC as distributed on DC feeder lines. This is already true in some large offices and industrial concerns. This is because a lot of the power used in LED lighting is used in the conversion from A/C to D/C. Want to prove this to yourself? Go find a screw in LED lamp in your house. Feel the glass where the light comes out. Now feel the base (don't touch the metal). The base is hotter isn't it? That is where the A/C to D/C converter is.
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  18. Besides the white LED, blue LEDs enabled Bluray and the high definition revolution. It was a big, big, big (big) deal.
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  19. "inspired". Lovin' it.
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  20. It wasn't a law, it was an observation.
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  21.  @michaellau5329  Didn't follow that at all. Two chips in a package with X and Y heat generation somehow is not X+Y? New math?
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  22. Very well done, thanks.
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  23. Emperor Xi knows all about power. His first business venture was selling dried cow dung for cooking fuel...
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  24. 120,000 wafers at what, about 300-500 yield per wafer is about 60 million chips. These guys print money.
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  25. A tie in with IEEE Spectrum and the final approach to 1m subs. I watched your channel grow You truly made it. Congratulations.
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  26. I like your channel, its good information. However, the presentation comes off as a bit unprofessional. I think your working from a script vs. ad-libbing (as it appears you do) would be a big improvement.
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  27. Gee, AMD and Intel fighting, imagine that.
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  28.  @AlfaPro1337  I think you might find that AMD believes that to be the other way around.
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  29. "DRAM faces scaling limits" I would think this could mean that static memory would lap dynamic memory, since static memory cells only need transistors, not capacitors. This would be a good thing, since statics are faster and don't need refresh cycles. This already happened in random logic applications like CPUs, where they moved to static logic and dumped dynamic logic like domino logic, which had minimum clocking requirements. I like to think of IC tech like trains racing on multiple tracks. For example CMOS logic took a back seat to NMOS tech for many years, until NMOS hit the speed/power wall, then suddenly everyone switched to CMOS.
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  30. The drip drip drip of the puns here turned into a flood. We are drowning in them.
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  31. At the risk of being politically incorrect, the west's ability to make the rocks come alive and attack enemies in the middle east is like something right out of the Koran.
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  32. don't buy from people stupider than you...
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  33. God made millimeter waves to allow cellphone direct to satellite connections.
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  34. I never bought a computer. I made all of them. But I had to repair friends and relations Compaq and other computers. In those days, the makers went out of their way to make proprietary cases, motherboards and DRAMs. It was sad to see, and it, it my opinion, contained the seeds of their demise and the rise of the Asian computer dominance. I could get an off the shelf case, motherboard and other components and make a PC cheaper than Compaq and other makers pre-built machines. IBM gave us standard motherboard sizes. Companies like Compaq, despite creating the IBM clone market, choose to step on that.
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  35. The utopian idea is that everything will be free, and nobody would hoard because they knew they could always get more. But people are not stupid, and know full well that supplies will end soon, and so hoard as much as they can. Its obvious with food, but in the Soviet Union, it rapidly went to every possible item because people realized they could trade for other things. Thus when anything was offered "for free" the people knew to grab it. The result was obvious: go back to money so that the supply was self limiting. The genius of the soviet system after the reintroduction of money is that the state was the only approved buyer of any goods. Thus they were able to set all prices and control the economy.
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  36. The story goes that the chairman of Sony saw little drink umbrellas that came from Japan, and Japanese goods were considered "junk", and went home to fix that. We are making the same mistake in the USA with respect to China. The days of China producing low end copies are over.
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  37. Gonna cross the big half million I see. I've been watching since less than 100k. Congratulations.
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  38. Intel likes to take over cities. Look at Hillsboro and Chandler.
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  39. Lithography, literally "stone printing", which is rather funny if you think about it.
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  40. Microsoft made 3d APIs about as well as Hitler made elderly care centers.
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  41. I literally went to war with people spreading misinformation on a subject for which I am one of the few remaining experts. I succeeded, but I would have had to continue the fight... forever. The last straw was I noticed that the same misinformation was being spread on the same pages in other languages. It just isn't worth it. Take all Whackipedia information with a grain of salt.
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  42. knock-on ef·fect noun a secondary, indirect, or cumulative effect. "a decline in butterflies would have a knock-on effect on other British species"
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  43.  @uploadJ  Sure. The first simulator I did was a standard switch level simulator. These are good, but don't consider many physical attributes such as the resistance of the switch other than being able to produce "weak" states, so that transistors with greater power can take over a node. The RC simulator gives a simulation between switch level and SPICE, and gives actual switching curves, a real picture of strong vs. weak switches, and yet gives reasonable speed.
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  44.  @uploadJ  Yea, the view of an IC as a series of capacitors discharging through resistors by switches is obviously limited. However, its nice to see curves coming out of such a simple simulation. I had hopes for implementing the algorithm in hardware, and still do. Like getting a large net that executes reasonably fast, but is actually analog based. The impetus for all that was that our regular switch based simulator at Zilog could not handle resets, so that was done by node sets. I was interested in seeing if I could make a simulator that didn't need that kludge, mainly because I had just solved a serious reset bug in one of our chips! I was able to do that, mainly by introducing weak states into the simulation (this was the digital only simulator). I think that is standard now. They just killed my old chip, the Z80. Ah well. Crappy instruction set really. I made a compiler for it, but I can't believe I did that now.
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  45. You are right. The probe was a real accomplishment. Do you think its possible we will see a mercury lander one day?
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  46. Going to be a party when you cross 100k!
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  47. Nice overview, well researched. Hoping you get to 200k soon.
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  48. "Stanfurd"??? Sorry I just had to.
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  49. Small nit: Jack kilby and Robert Noyce were determined to be co-inventors of the IC patent. Although it is true that Kilby was first to announce, the lack of interconnect was considered crucial to the invention.
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  50. The key would be to control your tooling down to the mask level (the layout). IE., separating the pure software/data phase from the physical implementation phase. Masks can be compared to the generated layout, and even a fabbed chip can be compared to its layout without reverse engineering it. It is of course true that many of the EDA phases get "thrown over the wall", that is, a Verilog design can be send to a vendor to be laid out. However, the security there is up to the client. If the chip needs high security, the client can bring the tooling in-house to be more secure.
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