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posted by martyb on Friday November 30 2018, @03:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the making-a-big-deal-out-of-small-things dept.

For more than 30 years, Intel Corp. has dominated chipmaking, producing the most important component in the bulk of the world’s computers. That run is now under threat from a company many Americans have never heard of.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. [TSMC] was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. founder Jerry Sanders. "Real men have fabs,"[*] he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories.

These days, ridicule has given way to envy as TSMC plants have risen to challenge Intel at the pinnacle of the $400 billion industry. AMD recently chose TSMC to make its most advanced processors, having spun off its own struggling factories years before.

[*] "fab" is shorthand for Semiconductor fabrication plant.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-28/intel-s-chipmaking-throne-is-challenged-by-a-taiwanese-upstart


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @06:26AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30 2018, @06:26AM (#768189)

    I calculated yesterday that I need to buy one more rental property to keep me in a nice old folks home, provided relative prices remain somewhat constant. It's good to start planning these things in high school.

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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 30 2018, @08:13AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday November 30 2018, @08:13AM (#768206) Homepage Journal

    But to her great dismay, at eighty years old she's still as clear as a bell.

    That lady is like to be history's first duocentenarian. That will be to her great enjoyment of walking to work throughout her career.

    Get This:

    Despite being well into his eighties, Mick Jagger _still_ sings scales every day: "Do, Re, Me...".

    Now dearly departed, famed Neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in "Musicophilia" that when stroke, brain infection, brain injury as well as all other forms of non-fatal brain damage occur, our musical thinking is the very _last_ thing to go! That leads to my being greatly comforted by my continuing ability to sing really well. I can still sing on the street, but it's quite likely that when I do so tomorrow afternoon that I'll totally space my tip jar when I move on to my second street corner.

    I haven't tried lately, but I am quite certain I can still compose for and play the piano [soggywizards.com]. While Street Pianists consistently earn far, far more in tips than Street Singers do, due to the severity of my short-term memory lost I dasn't actually do so.

    Sacks wrote of the very worst Amnesiac in all of human history. Due to quite a severe brain infection, whenever this uncommonly courageous fellow lays eyes on his own wife he asks who she is, then she quite lovingly and patiently re-introduces herself too him, even if he looked away but for a moment.

    Just now I mostly write just fine but I'm barely able to speak to my friend.

    That fine fellow happens to be a virtuoso pianist, so there's a piano in his room at the hospital. Every last time he lays on it he is _dumbstruck_ by his great discovery, then at first hesitantly, curiously and cautiously approaches it, eventually to play _completely_ original and _highly_ complex music. To make music by randomly wailing at one's instrument is known as "improvisation". While it's not commonly taught anymore other than by and to jazz musicians, at one time it was common for entire symphony orchestras to improvise All At The Same Time!

    That I can improvise on the piano is due to the way I taught _myself_ to play it: having survived a brutal and uncommonly cruel eighth grade band teacher, I didn't even _consider_ getting lessons. My dyslexia no longer affects my reading because I long ago learned to compensate for it by repeatedly re-reading any sentence that did not at first make sense, but for me to learn a new piece by reading its score is for me the very worst and foul torment. So I taught myself to play at first just by slowly and cautiously feeling my way around the keyboard:

    I would play at first one note at a time - both white and black keys, the black keys are C-Major and A-Minor Sharps and Flats. Then I would play two or three keys at first in sequence, then all together. Many years later I learned that those are denoted as "Melodic" and "Harmonic" Intervals respectively. The chords that are most-commonly played are "Harmonious". "Dischordant" chords sound really bad - the Second, two adjacent keys together, and the Seventh - seven "Whole Steps" higher. (A Whole Step is one note away in a Major or Natural Minor Scale, a Half Step is the Sharp or Flat of each of those scales' note.

    It was not long at all before I was wailing away without anyone raising objections, then six weeks after I commenced piano study that I composed my first song, "The Emergence Of The Artist Within". I eventually clued in that that was a highly pretentious name for a song that sounded just like it was composed by a toy piano, so I renamed it just Emergence [soggywizards.com].

    And friends, many years later I realized that it _was_ composed on a toy piano, one that Grandma Crawford pilfered from her church's rummage sale for her neighbor children as well as for my older sister Jean as well as myself.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]