February 2019 – Page 5 – Peter's Quasi-Daily Blah-g

TSMC on Friday revealed more details regarding an incident with a photoresist material at its Fab 14B earlier this year. The contaminated chemical damaged wafers on TSMC’s 12 nm and 16 nm lines, and the company now expects the full impact of the event to reduce their revenue by a whopping $550 million in the first quarter.

TSMC said that a batch of photoresist it used included a specific element which was abnormally treated, creating a foreign polymer in the photoresist. The problem was detected late when the wafer yeilds were lower than expected. As it turns out, consequences of the photoresist incident at Fab 14B were more serious than initially calculated by TSMC. There are media reports claiming that between 10,000 and 30,000 wafers were affected and had to be scrapped, but TSMC has never confirmed either of the numbers.

According to media reports, the affected companies include HiSilicon/Huawei, NVIDIA, and MediaTek, but TSMC has not disclosed names of its customers that suffered from the incident. The only thing that TSMC does confirm is that it has already negotiated new delivery scheduled with its customers.

In any case, the cost of the wafers totals $550 million and they will be made up in Q2. In the meantime, TSMC is pulling in "certain production" from Q2, which will bring in $230 million in additional revenue in Q1. As a result, TSMC’s first quarter earnings are now expected to be between $7 billion and $7.1 billion, down from $7.3 – $7.4 billion predicted in mid-January.

In a bid to avoid similar situations in the future, TSMC will make inspection of incoming materials more thorough and will strengthen inline wafer inspection. The company also indicated that it will need better controls because of increasing complexity of leading-edge fabrication technologies.

Xbox One Gets Open Modding Platform Through A Third-Party

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/xbox-one-gets-open-modding-platform-through-a-thir/1100-6465093/

Cities: Skylines publisher Paradox Interactive has announced it is partnering with Microsoft to bring its opening modding platform, Paradox Mods, to Xbox One. Beginning today, February 20, players will be able to download and play mods for select Paradox titles on Microsoft’s console.

Through this partnership, mod creators can now easily distribute their mods across PC and Xbox One "with a single upload" using either GOG or the Paradox Launcher.

"Modding has been, and remains an important part of the Paradox community," Paradox Mods product owner Andres Törlind said. "As we have diversified the way we distribute our games, we want to make sure all our players can take part in the creation process."

The first game to receive mod support is Surviving Mars, a 2018 simulator that tasks players with building and sustaining a colony on the red planet. More than 30 mods are now available for the title. These can be accessed by logging into your Paradox Account on the game’s title screen, then selecting the Mod Manager option at the bottom of the screen. Additionally, the Xbox One version of the game has been updated to allow mouse and keyboard support

While Surviving Mars is currently the only Xbox One title to take advantage of this new feature, Paradox says that mod support for other titles "is planned to come later this year." You can take a look at some of the mods that are available through the platform on Paradox’s website.

via GameSpot’s PC Reviews https://ift.tt/2mVXxXH

February 20, 2019 at 08:25AM

February 20, 2019

Two guys built this 400,000-brick Lego VW Type 2 van in six weeks

https://www.autoblog.com/2019/02/19/vw-van-made-from-400000-lego-bricks/

Lego Volkswagen Type 2 Bulli Van Unveiled - Autoblog

At the

f.re.e travel and leisure convention

in Munich, Germany, the beloved

Volkswagen

Type 2 Bulli van comes in three flavors: classic, miniature Lego, and full-size Lego classic. Sitting on a stand next to its nearly identical brothers, the Lego Bulli was constructed in less than six weeks out of approximately 400,000 bricks.

Life-size Lego cars are popping up everywhere in the forms of the

, and the

, to name a few. It seems with each new model, there is more and more detail and ever-increasing functionality. This van is no different, as the amount of thought put into the design is incredible.

In addition to its working headlamps and taillights, opened side door, and pop-up camper top, the Type 2’s camper bits and interior decorating is fanatical. As seen in episode 4 of a mini-series filmed about the van below, the

has folding tables, a coffee set, picture frames on the walls, a radio, a gasoline grille, ketchup and mustard bottles, seasonings, and toothbrushes. For those still not impressed, it has beer bottles, too.

The van, which was crafted from about 400,000 Lego bricks, was built by two men, Pascal and Rene, in approximately six weeks time. To see how it was built and check out all the details, watch the

time lapse

and the rest of the documentary on

f.re.e’s Facebook page

via Autoblog https://ift.tt/1afPJWx

February 19, 2019 at 05:33PM

February 19, 2019

Another blow to Blu-ray: Samsung will no longer make Blu-ray players for the US

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1458715

Samsung’s UBS-K8500, introduced in 2015, was positioned as the world’s first UltraHD, 4K Blu-ray player.
Here it is at IFA 2015.

Mark Walton
The port situation was minimal.

Mark Walton
It hasn’t been that long since the market for these players opened up, and Samsung was one of the first to move into it.

Mark Walton

If you didn’t notice any Blu-ray player announcements from Samsung at CES this year, there’s a reason for that: the company has told both Forbes and CNET that it is getting out of the Blu-ray player business in the United States.

The large chaebol conglomerate will introduce no new Blu-ray players anywhere, it seems, and will stop making existing players for the US market. This comes as a confirmation of what many observers expected, given that the company last released a new player in 2017. Samsung was reportedly working on a high-end Blu-ray player for release in 2019, according to Forbes, but those plans have been scrapped.

Samsung didn’t tell either publication why it decided to exit the business, and there is probably no big, single reason for this shift. But there are a lot of small ones.

Samsung’s Blu-ray players lacked Dolby Vision HDR support and relied instead on HDR-10 or the Samsung-backed HDR-10+. This was an important omission for the target audience; Dolby Vision is attractive to home theater enthusiasts because of its theoretically superior specifications and because it allows moviemakers to more finely tune the experience as compared to HDR-10.

Most people probably don’t care about the differences between HDR-10 and Dolby Vision, but if anyone does, they’re buyers of UltraHD Blu-ray players who may feel that the bitrate of content streamed from Netflix, Amazon, or Apple is inadequate for their setups.

Also, streaming has come to dominate Americans’ viewing habits, especially in high-income households that would be enticed by expensive 4K HDR Blu-ray players. Physical media sales have been

declining

at double-digit percentage rates for a few years running. Even within those sales, 4K Blu-rays account for only 5.3 percent of sales compared to the aging DVD format, which still sits at 57.9 percent, according to Forbes.

Sony and Panasonic currently lead in the Blu-ray player market, and they have not announced plans to discontinue production. Samsung may have made this decision in response to its market dominance, not just the shrinking marketplace for physical media. And it probably doesn’t help that the widely owned PlayStation 4 and Xbox One game consoles are also perfectly adequate Blu-ray players for most consumers.

Samsung is not alone in abandoning the market, though. Last year, Oppo also left Blu-ray players behind.

Listing image by Mark Walton

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

February 18, 2019 at 04:41PM

February 15, 2019

Facebook Is Negotiating a Record Multi-Billion Dollar Fine for Its Privacy Problems: Report

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-is-negotiating-a-record-multi-billion-dollar-f-1832633623

Facebook is in active negotiations to resolve the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into the company’s privacy failures, according to a new Washington Post report, talks that could result in a multi-billion dollar fine or a heavyweight court battle. The report didn’t include an exact figure and said that …

Elon Musk-backed AI Company Claims It Made a Text Generator That’s Too Dangerous to Release

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-backed-ai-company-claims-it-made-a-text-gener-1832650914

Researchers at the non-profit AI research group OpenAI just wanted to train their new text generation software to predict the next word in a sentence. It blew away all of their expectations and was so good at mimicking writing by humans they’ve decided to pump the brakes on the research while they explore the damage…

Video Of A Real-Life Robotech Mecha Transforming

https://geekologie.com/2019/02/video-of-a-real-life-robotech-mecha-tran.php

This is a shaky video of a Macross (english adaptation Robotech) VF-1S mecha transforming at a previous Beijing Comic Convention. The all-metal 1/9 scale model was created by artist Sun Shiqian and transforms back and forth from its two forms all on its own. I know, I thought it was the Decepticon’s Starscream at first too. It’s not though, it’s a Robotech VF-1S mecha. I’ll admit, I’m not that familiar with the Robotech franchise. With the local Dairy Queen franchises? All the owners know me by name. And that name, of course, is — "Sir Eatalot?" IT’S THE BLIZZARD KING, JERK.
Keep going for a couple shots of the mecha and the video of its transformation, which is really just the gif in higher quality.

Thanks to my good pal/worst enemy Terry, who I will undoubtedly have to mech battle to the death one day. The future just isn’t big enough for the two of us.