541–550 of 741 posts
> Production of low-margin processors, such as those used to weigh clothes in a washing machine or toast bread in a smart toaster, has also been hit.
Maybe the silver lining of this situation is that the current push to make every appliance "smart" will slow down? I will take a "dumb" bread toaster any day over the "smart" version. And finally @internetofshit will be able to take some time off.
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Chips shouldn't go obsolete so fast. Your local auto parts store has in stock parts for cars made 50 years ago. That include aftermarket parts made in the past few years. You cannot support right to repair if you support the idea that chips go obsolete.
It's actually a "feature." Automakers like to have easily sun-settable, hard to replace parts to quickly remove old cars off the market. Now, they want to do it even quicker. DRMed autoparts are a new craze. A tsunami of them is coming in 2021+ cars. They all now want to do the the John Deere trick. They gave the industry a very bad example to follow.
I can't go into more detail than that.
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They've been low for a while now too. As annoying as it is to have a $670 car payment each month, you really can't beat 0% interest on a $40k loan. Especially in a market where the average monthly return on $40k in stocks has been pretty substantial.
You lose all of that and more on depreciation in the first two years. I buy older than most people; currently my newest car is a 2009. I do maintenance and routine repairs myself, and I lose almost nothing on depreciation. But you can still come out ahead by buying 4-6 years old and letting the original buyers take the bulk of the depreciation losses.
Car market is a bit strange right now.
Check the price on your 2009 on eBay or craiglist. Is it worth more than you think it should be?
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I feel like each year cars get way safer. It started with blind spot detectors/cameras, and modern cars will even brake automatically and keep you in your lane (or at least warn you if you leave it). Maybe new features like self-driving aren't as interesting, but I would buy a new car instead of a used one just for the perceived improved safety. I don't know if there's any research showing that these features actuall…
Many of these features add minimal benefit if you do some common-sense stuff such as, don't drive when you're really tired (or drunk, or on drugs, etc.); don't play with your phone while you're driving; don't read, do your makeup, shave, etc. while you're driving. IOW put your focus on the task at hand and you don't really need blind spot detectors. Of course the reality is that people are pretty bad at these things.
It's not clear to me how much of this change to the car shape is driven by competing safety standards, i.e. side impact and rollover protection, and how much it is the continuous march of fashion/stylistic tweaks.
Regarding cars: "Some carmakers are now leaving out high-end features as a result of the chip shortage, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday. Nissan is reportedly leaving navigation systems out of cars that would normally have them, while Ram Trucks has stopped equipping its 1500 pickups with a standard “intelligent” rearview mirror that monitors for blind spots" I have an unpopular opinion, especially when we…
Yeah, the size of these trucks has completely put me off ever wanting one. I miss the small ones from a few decades ago... great for surfing, hauling the ver occasional bit of stuff, just as useful as the ugly beasts of today but far cheaper and more maneuverable and safer. I think we need to start requiring commercial drivers licenses on some of these beasts. They are intentionally designed to be difficult to see ou…
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Trucks are vehicles. How can they be political? I know plenty of people from all kinds of backgrounds owning a truck.
"Rolling coal" (modifying a diesel engine to run rich and increase soot in the exhaust, a.k.a. incompletely combusted fuel) has become a statement in many places of the U.S. that you are opposed to the EPA, clean air rules, regulation, and in general the perceived nanny state. My friend is a Tesla owner in Georgia and has been deliberately blasted by these guys at stoplights a few times. They tried, anyway—hard to do…
But no, we must rely on our American friends who not only spy on us, but constantly rip us off, while themselves producing in Chine and Taiean.
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Yes of course the equipment breaks down but older equipment is easy to repair. It is very rare for a fab to be decommissioned and the equipment scrapped - in fact I have never heard of this happening to any production facility with 6” or larger wafers. That equipment will go to de-bottlenecking at some other fab and net production capacity for the node will increase . Obviously many very old chips are out of producti…
The corrollary to your point then is that all these fabs have immense idle capacity of exiting installed tools which they aren't using but retain simply because nothing ever "broke down"? Obviously that's ridiculous. You're interpreting me pedantically while actually agreeing with my point, I think. Old processes don't have the capacity they used to[1]. If you don't like "stuff breaks" then how about "eventually the…
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I wonder if you could run the firmware in emulation on a more recent CPU.
I don't think one can even fund assembler docs for a chip so old, rare, and obscure as first SH-1,2,3 families.
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They are actually useful vehicles in rural places.
This thread is filled with ignorant city boys who have never done any useful farm work. I cannot imagine how excrutiating it would be for my wife to have to pay a bunch of stupid taxes and follow a bunch of fascist new laws in order to grow her 100sq ft garden every year which, even so small, STILL requires truckloads of compost and mulch since we are just in the process of building our soil. And that's just for the…