Detroit had the 'right' industries until Asia started making steel better and cheaper than the USA.
The reason why Henry Ford set up shop in Detroit was because land was cheaper as it was rocky and unsuitable for farming than other parts of the East Coast and Midwest. If the price of steel was a major factor, the Big Three should have built smaller cars with less steel. But that wasn't the issue. Like the rest of America, they sat on their fat asses and built bigger cars.
Just so you know, even very nice jeans cost less than a house or a car.
I pay $20 for jeans and wear a pair for five years. My older brother pays $200 for designer jeans and buys a new pair every year. In a five year period, I would have spent $20 on jeans and he would have spent $1,000 on designer jeans.
It's not uncommon to have waits of several hours as the passenger train sits on a siding waiting for a freight to pass, or for whatever other reason the railroad decides.
I once spent most of the day before Thanksgiving Day stuck on an Amtrak train to Sacramento. Repairs on the track initially caused the four-hour delay. When the repairs were done, the train couldn't move because the engineers and conductors have finished their shift for the day, and, under federal law, couldn't finish the 30 minute trip to Sacramento. It took three hours to get a new crew to drive out from Sacramento and find the access road to the train that was outside of Davis.
[...] but what the US needs is high speed freight trains
There's a box car shortage as many are near the end of their 50-year lifecycle and newer boxcars are so expensive that they're not economical for the railroads to put into service.
The number of boxcars in service in North America fell by 41% in the past decade to just under 125,000 last year as 101,600 cars were scrapped and only about 13,800 replacement were added. That downsizing accelerated a decadeslong shift by railroads to more specialized railcars and intermodal carriers that allow shipping containers to hop from trucks to trains.
Renting isn't so bad, but $2k/month is going to be a pretty big chunk of your take home pay. (more than 50% of it).
Rent and utilities is 40% of my monthly pay for a studio apartment. I'm socking away 20% for savings and retirement, and living off the rest. Some people consider me "poor" because I don't want a big house, fancy cars or designer jeans.
Places with established infrastructure in related industries tend to attract start ups and industry leaders alike.
The only reason that Microsoft got started in Albuquerque is that the company owner of the Altair computer insisted that Paul and Bill come from Harvard to work on Microsoft Basic under his supervision. The two local boys were from Seattle. When the contract was over, they went home and built out their company. Seattle didn't become a tech hub until after Microsoft became big enough to affect the local economy.
I can have a pretty good life in San Antonio making 50 +
I make a good life in Silicon Valley on $50,000 per year. But some people consider me "poor" because I'm not competing with them for outward wealth. I read an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning that neighbors of a lottery jackpot winner are more likely to go bankrupt because they're going into debt to keep up outward appearances.
Those people in Cali make considerably more but they have to as their rent/mortgage, food, utilities, and everything else cost so much more than it does in Texas (or those rural areas especially.)
I live and work in Silicon Valley, making $50,000+ a year. This is only possible by living a modest lifestyle that doesn't include a big house, brand new cars, and designer jeans. I gave up on the American Dream of having it all and learned how to be content with what I have. Some people consider me to be "poor" because I'm not spending money on the outward appearance of wealth.
Fail fast works better for sales calls. Talk to as many people as possible to overcome the fear, doubts and frustrations about selling. The faster you fail at selling, the more likely to get a sale.
Please realize that the external bus does not determine the number of bits a CPU is classified as, you clueless little shit.
It does if you're designing electronics around the processor. As I explained elsewhere, you need to know how many lines are coming out. The internal structure of the processor only matters when it comes to programming.
I've owned at least one of every generation of x86 CPU.
As a PC owner or an electronic hobbyist?
No x86 CPU was ever 8-bit.
According to Wikipeda: "The Intel 8088 ("eighty-eighty-eight", also called iAPX 88) microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on July 1, 1979, the 8088 had an 8-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range were unchanged, however. In fact, according to the Intel documentation, the 8086 and 8088 have the same execution unit (EU)â"only the bus interface unit (BIU) is different. The original IBM PC was based on the 8088."
Also from Wikipeda: "Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is a retronym term for the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was (largely) backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT as well as IBM PC compatibles."
If IBM wanted the PC/XT to be a 16-bit computer, they would have gone with the 8086 and not the low end 8088. The PC AT was the first 16-bit computer with the 286, skipping the 186 that was available in both 8- and 16-bit models for the external data bus. As someone else pointed out, the Tandy 2000 actually had a 16-bit 186 processor and was marketed as compatible with the XT.
You're too young to know what you're talking about, junior.
I got into electronics and computers in the 1980's. I read Byte Magazine as religiously as the next electronic hobbyist in Silicon Valley.
I get paid $125/hr and the contractor pimp gets about $10/hr on top of that.
I actually don't know what the pimps above me are getting paid for my employment. Keystone pricing is common in retail where every step through the chain doubles the price. But for the IT work on do, $25 per hour on W2 is typical. A 1099 contractor might get $35 per hour.
This idea is only accurate if you are a raging novice on the subject.
When I was studying electronics in the 1980's, the most common processors available to the home hobbyist had a fixed data bus: 8-bit processors had eight lines, 16-bit processors had 16 lines, and 32-bit processors had 32 lines. When I got into college and took intro electronics, I no longer wanted to do electronics as a career and eventually found my way into software testing and IT. Now that I have time and money, I'm getting back into electronics as a hobby. With all the datasheets available on the Internet, I'm finding out that there is a wide range of variations for implementing a processor.
A data bus could be 1-bit (aka serial) and I imagine if optical computing ever takes off that that might be the best choice there.
That prompted a lot of bitching and moaning on a microcontroller design with a 64-bit processor that had four 8-bit serial pins. Some people wanted 64 lines out. A lot of people who use microcontrollers don't understand electronics and want something that can plug into something else. Adding logic glue to go from four lines to 32 lines is beyond them.
Or a 6502 would be a 16 bit processor because it has an 16 bit address bus.
I was referring to the data bus on the processor. The 6502 was an 8-bit processor with eight lines for the data bus and 16 lines for the address bus (64K RAM). The 65816 was a 8/16-bit processor with eight lines for the data bus and 16 lines for the address bus that is multiplexed for a 24-bit memory space (16MB). The data bus is the parallel lines that run out to the memory chips.
You always need to check the schematics when designing electronics around a particular processor. The 86000 processors had a 32-bit instruction set, but the early models had an eight or 16 line data bus with 20- or 24-bit addressing, respectively. Later models had a 32 line data bus and 32-bit addressing.
Although I took intro electronics in college, I never pursued it as a career and eventually ended up in IT. I've gotten back into electronics as a hobby now that I have the time and money. (As a kid, I had the time but not the money.) I'm going through various designs to press a button to increment a counter from 0 to 9 on a LED display. My focus is on the "data" lines between different chips.
One line inverted from the switch with a debouncer to the clock input of the decade counter.
Nine lines (1-9) inverted from the decade counter to the 9-to-4 priority encoder. Line 0 on the counter is connected to a LED light as a status indicator. Zero on the encoder is represented by nine lines being held high.
Four lines inverted from the 9-to-4 priority encoder to the BCD to seven segment decoder. BCD is Binary Converted Decimal that represents 0-9 in four bits (or four lines).
Seven lines from the BCD to seven segment decoder to the LED display.
The next design of this circuit will have the nine-to-four encoder and two inverters chips replaced by signal diodes to reduce nine lines to four lines. Zero is represented by nine lines being held low.
If I was using a microcontroller for the design, I could use one line out to the clock input of the decade counter, or four lines out to connect to the BCD input on the seven segment decoder and discard two-thirds of the circuit. Turning on these lines is a programming detail that may or may not require me to know what is going on in the processor.
Mr criemer makes $25 an hour. Criemer IT Contracting Ltd. bills out at a totally different rate.
I get paid $25 per hour on W2 by the contracting agency. The contracting agency gets paid $50 per hour per by the primary contractor. The primary contractor gets paid $100 per hour by the government.
What defines the bit width of an instruction set isn't connected to data bus width, as different implementations of the same instruction can have different data bus widths.
That's news to me. When I doing electronics as a teenager in the 1980's, an 8-bit processor had eight data lines, a 16-bit processor had 16 data lines, and a 32-bit processor had 32 data lines. I recently saw a 64-bit microcontroller that implemented one-half of the data bus (32 bits) as four 8-bit serial ports (four pins). I'm not sure if that's a four-bit or two-bit design.
If I wasn't working for government IT, I could make 40% more in salary. On the other hand, I wouldn't have 20 Paid Time Off (PTO) days, paid federal holidays, the usual benefit package, and the job security that comes from the prime contract being fully funded for the next four years. It really does suck to be poor in Silicon Valley.
That depends on what you consider to be an 8-bit processor. Based on other comments, the devil is in the details regarding the 8086/8088 processors. I pointed out to another poster that the 80186 had an internal multiplexed 20-bit bus and available with an 8-bit or 16-bit external data bus. Unless someone changed the definition for a processor in the last 40 years, the data bus determines bit-width of a processor.
8088 was 8 bits. 8086 was 16 bits so I assume x86 should mean at least 16 bits.
If you really want to nitpick... The 80186, based on the 8086, had a multiplexed 20-bit internal address bus and, depending on the model, an 8-bit or 16-bit external data bus. The 80186 was never released for the PC market, but was typically used for embedded applications and IBM token ring network cards. So I assume x86 should mean at least eight bits (for the data bus).
Slashdot Mirror
Detroit had the 'right' industries until Asia started making steel better and cheaper than the USA.
The reason why Henry Ford set up shop in Detroit was because land was cheaper as it was rocky and unsuitable for farming than other parts of the East Coast and Midwest. If the price of steel was a major factor, the Big Three should have built smaller cars with less steel. But that wasn't the issue. Like the rest of America, they sat on their fat asses and built bigger cars.
Just so you know, even very nice jeans cost less than a house or a car.
I pay $20 for jeans and wear a pair for five years. My older brother pays $200 for designer jeans and buys a new pair every year. In a five year period, I would have spent $20 on jeans and he would have spent $1,000 on designer jeans.
It's not uncommon to have waits of several hours as the passenger train sits on a siding waiting for a freight to pass, or for whatever other reason the railroad decides.
I once spent most of the day before Thanksgiving Day stuck on an Amtrak train to Sacramento. Repairs on the track initially caused the four-hour delay. When the repairs were done, the train couldn't move because the engineers and conductors have finished their shift for the day, and, under federal law, couldn't finish the 30 minute trip to Sacramento. It took three hours to get a new crew to drive out from Sacramento and find the access road to the train that was outside of Davis.
[...] but what the US needs is high speed freight trains
There's a box car shortage as many are near the end of their 50-year lifecycle and newer boxcars are so expensive that they're not economical for the railroads to put into service.
The number of boxcars in service in North America fell by 41% in the past decade to just under 125,000 last year as 101,600 cars were scrapped and only about 13,800 replacement were added. That downsizing accelerated a decadeslong shift by railroads to more specialized railcars and intermodal carriers that allow shipping containers to hop from trucks to trains.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shortage-of-railroad-boxcars-has-shippers-fuming-2015-06-21
Silicon valley is not the center of the universe.
I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. This is my home. People are always surprised that there are natives still left in the area.
Renting isn't so bad, but $2k/month is going to be a pretty big chunk of your take home pay. (more than 50% of it).
Rent and utilities is 40% of my monthly pay for a studio apartment. I'm socking away 20% for savings and retirement, and living off the rest. Some people consider me "poor" because I don't want a big house, fancy cars or designer jeans.
Places with established infrastructure in related industries tend to attract start ups and industry leaders alike.
The only reason that Microsoft got started in Albuquerque is that the company owner of the Altair computer insisted that Paul and Bill come from Harvard to work on Microsoft Basic under his supervision. The two local boys were from Seattle. When the contract was over, they went home and built out their company. Seattle didn't become a tech hub until after Microsoft became big enough to affect the local economy.
I can have a pretty good life in San Antonio making 50 +
I make a good life in Silicon Valley on $50,000 per year. But some people consider me "poor" because I'm not competing with them for outward wealth. I read an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning that neighbors of a lottery jackpot winner are more likely to go bankrupt because they're going into debt to keep up outward appearances.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/02/16/why-you-might-go-bankrupt-if-your-next-door-neighbor-wins-the-lottery/
Those people in Cali make considerably more but they have to as their rent/mortgage, food, utilities, and everything else cost so much more than it does in Texas (or those rural areas especially.)
I live and work in Silicon Valley, making $50,000+ a year. This is only possible by living a modest lifestyle that doesn't include a big house, brand new cars, and designer jeans. I gave up on the American Dream of having it all and learned how to be content with what I have. Some people consider me to be "poor" because I'm not spending money on the outward appearance of wealth.
Fail fast works better for sales calls. Talk to as many people as possible to overcome the fear, doubts and frustrations about selling. The faster you fail at selling, the more likely to get a sale.
Please realize that the external bus does not determine the number of bits a CPU is classified as, you clueless little shit.
It does if you're designing electronics around the processor. As I explained elsewhere, you need to know how many lines are coming out. The internal structure of the processor only matters when it comes to programming.
I've owned at least one of every generation of x86 CPU.
As a PC owner or an electronic hobbyist?
No x86 CPU was ever 8-bit.
According to Wikipeda: "The Intel 8088 ("eighty-eighty-eight", also called iAPX 88) microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on July 1, 1979, the 8088 had an 8-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range were unchanged, however. In fact, according to the Intel documentation, the 8086 and 8088 have the same execution unit (EU)â"only the bus interface unit (BIU) is different. The original IBM PC was based on the 8088."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8088
Also from Wikipeda: "Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is a retronym term for the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was (largely) backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT as well as IBM PC compatibles. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture
If IBM wanted the PC/XT to be a 16-bit computer, they would have gone with the 8086 and not the low end 8088. The PC AT was the first 16-bit computer with the 286, skipping the 186 that was available in both 8- and 16-bit models for the external data bus. As someone else pointed out, the Tandy 2000 actually had a 16-bit 186 processor and was marketed as compatible with the XT.
You're too young to know what you're talking about, junior.
I got into electronics and computers in the 1980's. I read Byte Magazine as religiously as the next electronic hobbyist in Silicon Valley.
There was never an 8-bit x86 CPU.
Please read the other comments on this thread. You might surprise yourself.
Would this entry have won the contest if Amazon wasn't working on a drone delivery program?
I get paid $125/hr and the contractor pimp gets about $10/hr on top of that.
I actually don't know what the pimps above me are getting paid for my employment. Keystone pricing is common in retail where every step through the chain doubles the price. But for the IT work on do, $25 per hour on W2 is typical. A 1099 contractor might get $35 per hour.
This idea is only accurate if you are a raging novice on the subject.
When I was studying electronics in the 1980's, the most common processors available to the home hobbyist had a fixed data bus: 8-bit processors had eight lines, 16-bit processors had 16 lines, and 32-bit processors had 32 lines. When I got into college and took intro electronics, I no longer wanted to do electronics as a career and eventually found my way into software testing and IT. Now that I have time and money, I'm getting back into electronics as a hobby. With all the datasheets available on the Internet, I'm finding out that there is a wide range of variations for implementing a processor.
A data bus could be 1-bit (aka serial) and I imagine if optical computing ever takes off that that might be the best choice there.
That prompted a lot of bitching and moaning on a microcontroller design with a 64-bit processor that had four 8-bit serial pins. Some people wanted 64 lines out. A lot of people who use microcontrollers don't understand electronics and want something that can plug into something else. Adding logic glue to go from four lines to 32 lines is beyond them.
Or a 6502 would be a 16 bit processor because it has an 16 bit address bus.
I was referring to the data bus on the processor. The 6502 was an 8-bit processor with eight lines for the data bus and 16 lines for the address bus (64K RAM). The 65816 was a 8/16-bit processor with eight lines for the data bus and 16 lines for the address bus that is multiplexed for a 24-bit memory space (16MB). The data bus is the parallel lines that run out to the memory chips.
You always need to check the schematics when designing electronics around a particular processor. The 86000 processors had a 32-bit instruction set, but the early models had an eight or 16 line data bus with 20- or 24-bit addressing, respectively. Later models had a 32 line data bus and 32-bit addressing.
Do you realize that under your definition, you probably posted that with a 256-bit computer?
Probably a 128-bit computer. It's an Intel Celeron dual-core processor. That could probably explain why my inexpensive Dell laptop is so snappy.
The interface is not the most relevant feature.
Although I took intro electronics in college, I never pursued it as a career and eventually ended up in IT. I've gotten back into electronics as a hobby now that I have the time and money. (As a kid, I had the time but not the money.) I'm going through various designs to press a button to increment a counter from 0 to 9 on a LED display. My focus is on the "data" lines between different chips.
The next design of this circuit will have the nine-to-four encoder and two inverters chips replaced by signal diodes to reduce nine lines to four lines. Zero is represented by nine lines being held low.
If I was using a microcontroller for the design, I could use one line out to the clock input of the decade counter, or four lines out to connect to the BCD input on the seven segment decoder and discard two-thirds of the circuit. Turning on these lines is a programming detail that may or may not require me to know what is going on in the processor.
Mr criemer makes $25 an hour. Criemer IT Contracting Ltd. bills out at a totally different rate.
I get paid $25 per hour on W2 by the contracting agency. The contracting agency gets paid $50 per hour per by the primary contractor. The primary contractor gets paid $100 per hour by the government.
What defines the bit width of an instruction set isn't connected to data bus width, as different implementations of the same instruction can have different data bus widths.
That's news to me. When I doing electronics as a teenager in the 1980's, an 8-bit processor had eight data lines, a 16-bit processor had 16 data lines, and a 32-bit processor had 32 data lines. I recently saw a 64-bit microcontroller that implemented one-half of the data bus (32 bits) as four 8-bit serial ports (four pins). I'm not sure if that's a four-bit or two-bit design.
Not believable.
If I wasn't working for government IT, I could make 40% more in salary. On the other hand, I wouldn't have 20 Paid Time Off (PTO) days, paid federal holidays, the usual benefit package, and the job security that comes from the prime contract being fully funded for the next four years. It really does suck to be poor in Silicon Valley.
Which weren't x86 processors.
That depends on what you consider to be an 8-bit processor. Based on other comments, the devil is in the details regarding the 8086/8088 processors. I pointed out to another poster that the 80186 had an internal multiplexed 20-bit bus and available with an 8-bit or 16-bit external data bus. Unless someone changed the definition for a processor in the last 40 years, the data bus determines bit-width of a processor.
8088 was 8 bits. 8086 was 16 bits so I assume x86 should mean at least 16 bits.
If you really want to nitpick... The 80186, based on the 8086, had a multiplexed 20-bit internal address bus and, depending on the model, an 8-bit or 16-bit external data bus. The 80186 was never released for the PC market, but was typically used for embedded applications and IBM token ring network cards. So I assume x86 should mean at least eight bits (for the data bus).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80186
What's your hourly rate as a contractor?
$25 per hour on W2.
The world will only need six computers with 640 cores each. ;)