Kirkland / COSCO hearing aids change the world for me

View 805 Wednesday, January 08, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

 

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

 

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

It’s Wednesday, and the flu has still got me. I feel worse now than I did Monday. Possibly some of that is due to going out Tuesday.

It Changed My Life

Tuesday I got my new Kirkland Signature Receiver in Ear Hearing Instrument Model K5562-DRW hearing aids at COSTCO. They had already programmed mine but I got there a few minutes early and the very competent and extremely pleasant young lady technician was programming a new pair for people whose appointments were after mine, so I got to see a bit of how that was done. They seem to have many options, all done on a laptop computer with Bluetooth connection to the instruments – both at once although they can work on one at a time. Between the prescription I had from Kaiser and the tests she had done last week when I decided to buy them, they had a pretty good picture of the complicated pattern of my hearing loss. It took about half an hour of instructions to be sure I understood how to do everything from changing batteries – about every three days – to tuning the volume, to recharging the remote. There are three programs put into the instruments. Inspection of the documents that came with them show a capacity for four. The three I have are for ordinary use, use in crowds with background noise, and one intended for when I am listening to music or at the opera. Since I didn’t know it was possible to have a fourth I never asked what that ought to be for, but apparently I can get them reprogrammed, including adding a fourth option, anytime I want to. I can also go out and have them cleaned and new batteries put in any time I shop at COSTCO. I’ll probably do that although I don’t think of any program I need that I don’t have.

When I put them in my life changed. I had them on the #1 or “ordinary” program, and suddenly I could hear things. The click of computer keys, which I haven’t heard in years. Door works when you turn the knob. Rustle of paper when you put things away. My own footsteps. All kinds of sounds that most of you pay no attention to, but which I haven’t heard in so many years that I had forgotten they existed. Moreover, I hear them more loudly and clearly than I have for forty years and more.

I went out into the COSTCO store crowd. Used the remote first to change the program to #2, the suppress background noise program, and then to lower the volume a click or two. Wonderful. I could still hear myself walking, people coming up behind me, random conversations. A pretty blonde athletic lady with a pony tail followed by – perhaps better to say accompanied by – three girls who were very clearly her own, ages about 10, 9, and 7, although they might have been 10, 10, and 7; hard to tell, and I didn’t want to alarm anyone by paying a lot of attention to them. But I could hear them talk. And having granddaughters I found them interesting. Reluctantly I went on through the store, just wandering about to see the wonders of COSTCO – there are some – and kept finding them coming up behind me or toward me when I turned into an aisle; apparently their mother was casing the joint as I was.

And I could hear everyone around me. This was just before noon; as noon approached COSTCO blossomed with free samples of food appearing everywhere. You could eat enough to live on there assuming you could wangle a membership. I suppose they have ways of discouraging that. I ended up buying very little, several bags of coffee beans in 2 ½ lb. bags and costing less per pound than the same blends – Columbian and Sumatran – that I usually get at Trader Joe’s, and about the same price per pound we pay for Sumatran at Smart and Final.

I’m wearing down. This flu is painful. Fortunately it is a beautiful Spring day outside, about 75 F. And the radio is telling me that Swine Flu is back and several have died of it in LA County. I should have got my flu shots. Only of course I did get my flu shots. I always do. And I can’t guarantee that I have flu, although most of the symptoms fit. The exception is my nasal passages. I am sort of stuffed up, my head feels full of cotton wool, but I don’t have that much trouble breathing. I do cough up stuff. Sudafed is enough to get me through the night, mostly. I’m almost out and I’d go out to get more but I don’t feel up to going out.

Anyway last night for the first time since we have had it, the TV volume was about 16=20 as opposed to the 20-35 I usually have to set it to. And I could hear the words without having to watch the sub=titles. I may turn off the sub-titles if this keeps on. And this morning I could hear the radio as well as read the paper, a kind of multitasking I used to do but haven’t since The Lump was extirpated.

I’ll have more on this as I gain more experience, but I can recommend the Kirkland hearing instrument sold by COSTCO, since they have a guarantee – if you don’t like them, you take them back and they refund your money. I paid essentially $2000 for the pair, and it’s a good use of the money.

 

 

Moore’s law may be over for awhile.

Here’s a pretty good overview, and abstract, with graphs:

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123529-nvidia-deeply-unhappy-with-tsmc-claims-22nm-essentially-worthless

This is no secret in the semiconductor industry. Industrial ICs have always used inexpensive process nodes. However, GPUs are high volume consumer products that have always been able to use more, cheaper transistors.

However, the 20 and 14nm processes at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (The premier fab, really) have transistors that cost about the same as its 28nm node. Just to be clear, historically one would expect 14nm to be 1/3 to 1/4 the cost.

Maybe TSMC fouled up? No, the new nodes work, they’re just not cheaper. Also, a separate foundry (a huge organization spun off from AMD) Global Foundries (GF) has also hit a similar wall near these numbers using slightly different technologies.

And, maybe the customers designed bad chips? No; Nvidia and AMD are both reporting similar cost problems across all their related product lines.

Intel may be having problems as well; They are opening up their formerly proprietary fabs to take outside work. This is at minimum a sign that they can’t pay for their fabs with PC CPUs alone.

In my understanding, Moore’s law has always been a marketing rule-of-thumb that customers will buy something twice as good, and it usually takes 18 months to get it. In the real world, exponentials usually become s-curves after a bit. It may be that optical thin-film lithography on silicon has reached its limits.

So, something really new will now be needed to sell up the customers, and there may be a pause in the tempo. Molecular manufacturing would be just the thing, but I don’t think it’s ready, at least, there’s no public evidence of it.

 

Ray

There are signs that Moore’s Law is best described with an ogive or logistic curve, not a simple exponential.  As Possony and I pouted out in The Strategy of Technology, the ogive or “S curve” describes a great deal of technological development, as for instance, the speed of aircraft through the 19th Century. Sometimes one ogive flattens out only to enter another period of rise, the first part of which looks like an exponential.  We don’t have enough data to be sure where Moore’s Law (which is, after all, more empirical than theoretical) will go.  My own belief is that we’ll see one more iteration at least. That would be astounding progress.  Even if we only get a 50% improvement…

My point really is that less and less unskilled labor is required to sustain civilization.  Encouraging everyone to expect the kind of middle class life of the semi skilled worker after World War II may be a mistake.  Sure, some will rise into a new middle class, but most of them will do so because of productivity – and the number needed to increase productivity is falling, not rising.  Given jobs eliminated and workers who have ceased to look for work, unemployment in the US is 11 – 12%, not the politically correct 7+ we pretend to believe.  Any economic plan must understand this.  It must also understand that the school system is useless in teaching skills to the lower 40% of the population. (Lower 40% is IQ <= 90.) These are not stupid or useless people; but they are not being trained to be part of a modern high tech civilization, and they are not needed in modern farming. Some will find a home in organic farming, possibly a very good home. ) 

I’d write more on this but my head is full of cotton wool.

 

Moore’s Law, TSMC

Everything else being equal, more transistors per wafer should lead to a lower cost per transistor. But yield difficulties reduce the cost advantage.

I can’t remember a new process innovation that didn’t have yield problems as it ramped up.

The industry has known this since the 1960s when a typical wafer was 3" and a typical LSI at the limits of technology had a few hundred transistors. Meanwhile, chip designers always pack more transistors onto a given chip area so the total area of silicon stays about the same. For example, a Pentium has always been roughly 1" square since the original ca. 1990.

Man Mountain Molehill

 

 

Maybe just drugging our problematic children isn’t the answer. Who knew?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/health/adhd-experts-re-evaluate-studys-zeal-for-drugs.html?src=recg

John Harlow

Of course we have been saying that here for years.  Ah well.  Unrestricted capitalism leads to many places. Of course over regulation of capitalism kills the goose laying those golden eggs. Everyone pretends to know this, but few act as if they do.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.