iamdead's comments

> Apple got a lot of explaining to do for the market to justify its price tag.

If it were down to feature lists and price tags, Apple wouldn't be selling very many phones. It seems Apple might be explaining itself in a way that doesn't resonate with you, which is which is fine.

> I am wondering if part of the deal is making sure Apple sticking to x86 and Specifically Intel's x86 CPU on the Mac for at least another 5 years. No ARM or AMD Mac.

I suspect that Apple had a lot of leverage in this negotiation, since they were the main ones interested in using Intel's modems as leverage against Qualcomm. So Intel's modems are more valuable to Apple than they are to other players, including Intel. But I don't know anything.

To the contrary, non-gamma-correct compositing is very common, since so many programs (both historically and today) simply never bothered to do it correctly--but we get good results anyway. In most situations we wouldn't notice the difference, it usually takes a somewhat contrived example to illustrate it well. You can see that the example chosen blends between primary red and primary green, which is not a natural color combination. If you replaced one of the two colors with primary blue, even then the artifacts would be less apparent (because of blue's lower luminosity).

My hot take is that physical correctness for graphics is very much in vogue right now, but this is coming at the sacrifice of psychovisual and physiological properties of graphics.

Gamma-correct compositing is one of those things that is actually quite difficult to detect, by most viewers, in most situations. For that reason it does not deserve to be put at the top.

This is a pretty thorough article. Why would you focus so much on gamma correction? How would you expand it?

I know someone who converted one of these into a home-made terminal, so they could connect to the computer at school and work from home. They drilled a hole into the TV, added a socket for video input which bypassed the antenna/demodulator, and hooked it up to a home-made 8-bit computer. 32 columns!

The story is a simplification, and that's its flaw, like most stories.

My experience is that while lifetime and cost are often correlated, they aren't always, the ratio is often a curve, and the curve is different for every product. My $10 Casio watch has outlasted some nicer watches costing more than $100. But I once made the mistake of buying a $40 pair of shoes, and they were unwearable within a few months.

Another example is that high-end suits with high thread count are supposedly less durable than less expensive suits, because the finer, more comfortable fabric is also thinner and wears more quickly.

No, you are not liable when someone robs the bank you use.

Product of zero or more primes. Otherwise you cannot factor 1.

In confidence, I’ve heard stories of simple cost-saving measures at fabs that have resulted in 9+ figures of damages. Honestly, I am impressed at how well these companies keep it out of the news. It’s a shame because the stories are really quite good.

You can have safeguards against contamination but these safeguards aren’t 100% reliable. The article reports “substandard” chemicals and that’s an umbrella term that includes contamination and many other problems.

Speaking as nothing more than a hobbyist, I can tell you that analog photography suffers from many of the same problems you might see in semiconductor manufacturing, only on a much smaller scale. I used to mix my own photochemicals from raw reagents and it’s a complex subject, to say the least. Exposure to air and minerals in the water have all sorts of effects, and the standard way to test your process is just to run film through it. I’m sure that fabs have better testing equipment than I do, but at the end of the day, it’s not feasible to test everything and I’m not surprised that a bad batch of chemicals made it through, ruining many batches of wafers due to the sheer depth of the manufacturing pipeline.

With photochemicals, a small change in the developer formulation can result in what is more or less a completely black and unworkable negative, or possibly a blank negative. I expect semiconductor manufacturing to be similar, since both processes rely so heavily on knowing reaction rates. Kinetics is complicated, to say the least. For photochemistry I rely heavily on using known developer / film concentrations and being borderline religious when it comes to temperature and time.

From what I understand, Intel's 10nm process is roughly the same as 7nm processes from other foundries, and Intel's 14nm is more or less 10nm on someone else's scale.

Does anyone else remember that this feature was present in old versions of Eudora on the Mac? It would literally put icons of chili peppers on your emails to say how spicy they were.