Hi Dave B; Re: able to post such voluminous responses to a chat board of a stock in which you have no apparent financial interest
I wish I did have a financial interest in this stock, but no, it is only an entertainment for me. I'm sorry that it is more for that, for people who are losing money one way or another on it.
It turns out that I can type very, very fast, about half as fast as I can think, there must be some bandwidth matching there. Incidentally, when I get done with my current project, I am going to go back to scalping, where finger speed is of the essence.
Pretty much all (board) design engineers are proficient at quickly surfing the web for information. The reason is that that is where you have to go to select parts. I find the Rambus subject fascinating, I've been posting on RMBS for near three years. It's just that I haven't been posting on this thread. Look on the Dell Bear thread. I put them there because posts on this thread tend to get lost. Eventually I will have said all I want to say, and I will be gone.
A few weeks ago, I figured I was about done with Rambus, since I have covered most of the technical issues I wanted to. But the manufacturability problems have brought this stock to the fore.
I have not yet thoroughly covered the following issues, though I have hinted at them, and other people have posted about them:
(a) Packaging trends. -- I'm still looking for a good technical article. Basically, Rambus was designed to save pins, but pins are getting cheaper and cheaper. I know there is an EE-Times article that quantifies this, but I haven't found it yet. When I do a search for "packaging," I get thousands of hits...
(b) Access latency. -- Counting nanoseconds is a pain, I'm used to getting paid for it, it just seems too much like work, so I keep procastinating. I may take a look at that RAC module specification, though, and compare it with the equivalent PC100 interfaces on the same silicon. That would be a cool comparison, and would show real latency differences, rather than the marketing crap that treats a DRAM chip as if it was the only thing in the world...
(c) Costs. -- This is a hard subject. Maybe waiting until Rambus equiped machines are available would be better.
Anyway, it appears that I impeded the janitor by sleeping in front of the wastebaskets. Advice on working long hours for engineers:
The four main food groups for engineers are supposed to be caffeine, sugar, grease and salt. I'm sure there are a lot of guys over at INTC, RMBS and the box makers that are living on it right now. My own opinion is that caffeine is overrated. (A great novel on the subject, by the way, is Memoirs From Antproof Case, by Mark Helprin.) I tend to catnap instead, and this allows me to put in some pretty long hours.
A good catnap should take about 30 minutes. It should be long and deep enough to enter REM sleep, in order to achieve real benefit. Those who have a habit of talking loudly in their sleep and dreaming of things, like their mother finding them masturbating, should probably avoid catnapping at work.
Catnapping is a traditional technique used by engineers to extend their working hours. The joke is that VLSI stands for Very Little Sleep Indeed, as engineers wait for compilations and simulations, as well as spend many hours entering code and trying to figure stuff out. Beginning engineers are not supposed to sleep in the office, so they usually figure out how to doze off while holding their hands over the keyboard. I've never figured this out, when I fall asleep I go completely limp.
But after you been around long enough, you can catnap whenever you need to, and they don't even wake you up. I believe that the janitor must have found me sleeping an hour ago, because I was asleep when she usually comes by, and then she emptied just my wastebaskets when I was working again.
Some people can't sleep in public, but I've never had any trouble. The other guys claim that I snore loudly enough to rattle keyboards 30 feet away, though. I don't doubt this, but, funny thing, I never hear it.
One should be careful what one rests one's face on while catnapping. One engineer I know took a nap on spiral bound notebook. When he woke up, he eventually figured out that he had two big red dots on his face where two of the three ring binder holes corresponded, and these were connected by the marks left by the spiral binding wire. It looked like he had stitches all up the side of his face. He was able to scare small children, just by smiling at them, for an hour or two.
-- Carl |
