It's an interesting case to me. The company I work for has been shipping systems on windows since the 90's despite pretty consistent requests from customers to ship hardware on Linux. 2 years ago we started creating our own Linux distribution and this year started shipping products on it. We still ship a lot of stuff on Windows 11, but that market share is starting to shift now. 10 years from now I could see us completely moved to our Linux distro. Now, what's actually interesting is that it wasn't customer requests or efficient capital allocation that drove this. Microsoft effectively forced us to do this against our will by a combination discontinued products and handling of Windows 11 and now that we've spent the capital we won't be going back.
You can't abandon Windows because of software X, Y, Z. Over the years vendors move to multiplatform as more and more customers ask for it. These changes are slow but steady. And one day you find out that the last "must have" software is not limited to Windows anymore. That's when the dam breaks.
If you are an absolute nutcase, you could characterize a set of line stretchers and a multiplexer on a high end VNA then offset the inputs of the 4 channels on that UXR with them, take a capture and finally rebuild a 1TSamp/s signal out of the 4 results.
You have to have the 240V model of the scope to run all four channels at full rate (110GHz) though.
The older Tektronix TDS540 series did this, but at much lower rates as was common in those days though. Internally there are differential feeds from the very beautiful hybrid ceramic input boards to 4 DACs, with some clever switching so that a single input can be sampled by all 4 DACs with a suitable offset to create 4x the sample rate when running with all 4 inputs.
The calibration procedure on the scope fiddles with the time alignment to get the different DACs correctly offset so that the combined signal is correct.
The hybrid ceramic input boards in their metal cases are a thing of beauty, fragile (don't ask how I know), but beautiful.
Yup, a lot of scopes actually did this internally and some still do. It's part of why some scopes lose half their BW when you go from 2 ports to 4 ports (some go the other direction and run multiple ports on one very fast ADC), they split the digitizers. It's just very very difficult to keep it working external to the box mainly because of line drift.
Keysight at least, has a fab where they make their own ADCs. Those are something like ENOB 6, 10 bit raw up to 120GHz and are used in their oscilloscopes but can also be purchased standalone.
Oscilloscopes also have a significant amount of additional front end conditioning, probe control, channel timing, and analysis software built into them. Most of the math functions on oscilloscopes use custom ASICs that work off the raw bits coming from the 120GHz digitizer which is non-trivial even just to receive. Calling it a plastic case around a digitizer is disingenuous.
It's technically not a signal generator but an Arbitrary Waveform Generator. It provides a base-band modulated signal to the signal generator which the sig gen upconverts to the RF carrier. If you purchased a Vector Signal Generator this would be built in but you can still buy them stand alone and they are pretty common. NI, R&S, Tek, and Keysight all have product lines of them.
Another way to think about it, this would be comparable to a signal generator in the same way that an oscilloscope is comparable to a spectrum analyzer.
What you call a signal generator is what most would call an RF signal generator. Both an AWG and an RF signal generator belong to the generic signal generator family. :-)
From the article
"I agree that a toxicological investigation of this anion would be useful now that we know its identity, but I am not overly worried about my tap water,” says Oliver Jones, Professor of Chemistry at RMIT. “The compound in question is not newly discovered, just newly defined. Its presence in some (not all) drinking waters has been known for over 30 years."
Chloramine has been in broad use for over a hundred years and this breakdown byproduct was well documented over 50 years ago and detectable in water over 30 years ago. What the article is claiming as new, or a "Phantom" is that someone imaged its particular molecular structure and is now requesting funding to run toxicology studies on it. There is no current reason to believe that it is harmful since tens of millions of exposures have not indicated any reactions to it over the past hundred years.
>> There is no current reason to believe that it is harmful since tens of millions of exposures have not indicated any reactions to it over the past hundred years.
When you look at the state of health in the world nowadays I'd have to disagree: at least one of these "no harmful" substances that we ingest is killing us.
Yotta marketed itself as a "bank" where every time you deposited to savings you would get a free lotto ticket for the month based on how much you deposited. They did this by offering below average interest rates on savings then parking people's money in accounts at banks with higher interest rates than they paid out and pulling some of the difference into a prize pool. Over time (very quickly actually) to increase revenue they pivoted into more traditional gambling.
Notably, Yotta is neither a bank nor a payment processor. They are just an "app" front end. Yotta's processor went bankrupt and the fintech bank they were working with to hold the accounts now disputes the amount of money they actually are holding to the tune of ~$96M being missing. This will probably be in courts for several years while things are unwound, someone will go to jail for financial crimes, and a lot of people will never be made whole. Some people have called for the FDIC to step in, but the FDIC has helpfully pointed out that no FDIC insured account has defaulted which is the necessary condition for FDIC insurance to pay out.
> Yotta marketed itself as a "bank" where every time you deposited to savings you would get a free lotto ticket for the month based on how much you deposited.
The archive link shows something a little more nuanced than Yotta presenting as a bank.
The archive link in gp has a hero text that says “banking” and then a few lines down says:
Yotta is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Evolve Bank & Trust and Thread Bank; Members FDIC.”
If I’m reading this as a consumer I’m thinking my money is protected but this Yotta thing is a lottery incentive to put deposits into those banks, maybe some loyalty incentive or marketing scheme on top of it?
Lesson learned, don't trust “not a bank” to deposit your money into the bank for you.
Should I be suspicious that Wealthfront Cash accounts will fail as well?
What about Fidelity Cash Management Accounts?
>Wealthfront isn’t a bank, but we work with partner banks to get you an industry-leading APY, the security of FDIC insurance, and a full array of fee-free, no-strings-attached checking features — all wrapped up into one label-defying package we call a Cash Account.
>The Fidelity Cash Management Account is not a bank account. It is a brokerage account that allows you to spend, save, and invest. The account offers competitive rates as well as spending and money movement features including a free debit card, checkwriting, Bill Pay, and more.
Just casually reading r/fidelity on Reddit (which is a subreddit run by Fidelity) would make me run fast and far from using their cash management account for anything. Widespread check fraud has caused Fidelity to be extremely cautious -- read slow -- in giving people access to checks they deposit into their CMAs. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, at least Fidelity is being cautious about taking care of their customers' money, but it's created a good deal of pain and anger for people who are depending on Fidelity for everyday banking-style transactions. I'll invest with Fidelity, but I prefer to keep my everyday money in a traditional bank or credit union.
if you have investments at fidelity you can just use the brokerage account as cash management. the brokerage account can access funds using a debit card and ACH just fine; I do still recommend opening a CMA for ATM fee reimbursements though.
none of these funds availability problems can happen if you have margin enabled; note that you won't pay any margin interest either as funds on hold are tradable immediately.
These could have similar issues with gaps in FDIC protections due to money is being “managed” by intermediaries or because of the type of account. Their fine print discloses as much.
As a sibling comment points out, Fidelity is seemingly a reputable enterprise with other business that would be adversely effected by poor management of this product and the reputation harm that would come with it.
Among other features Wealthfront are trying to manage around the $250K FDIC limit for you by moving your money into multiple insured accounts - this is probably a new area with not enough regulation.
Any comment on what issues there are with paying somebody to open accounts for you with, I assume- a power of attorney allowing them to do explicitly that?
At that point the only thing at risk is fraudulent use of said POA, and whatever funds are held outside of actual accounts.
> At that point the only thing at risk is fraudulent use of said POA, and whatever funds are held outside of actual accounts
Which exactly the reason why the FDIC didn't intervene in the article: the Fintech startup didn't deposit the unaccounted(!) millions of customer funds into FDIC-insured accounts. The law should be tightened up to prohibit claims of FDIC protection without meeting the reporting and deposit process requirements.
The two scenarios:
1) handing a business your life savings to manage, a
2) authorizing a company to manage your finances so they're in FDIC insured accounts
Are completely different. There's no laws to update, and the FDIC isn't skittering out of paying on a technicality.
And, frankly, if anybody reading this is looking at option #2- do yourself a favor and get an accountant and a wealth manager that both have fiduciary duties. Might as well find a lawyer as well.
Fidelity is very regulated, and large. If something happened it would be a systemic event that the government would definitely get involved. Wealthfront may be fine too, I just don't know.
To put it differently, Yotta’s customer’s misfortunes are because they are poor and not politically connected. If Fidelity fails, their customers are rich and they vote: they must be made whole.
Kind of like the SVB failure. SVB customers were made whole. Systematic risk and all that.
Fidelity’s brokerage business would be covered by SIPC, which would include its cash management accounts. They also likely sweep cash out to FDIC-insured accounts. More importantly though, Fidelity is large enough that you’re unlikely to need that insurance, and that’s really how I’d prefer to approach this.
Yeah we can look at 2008 and say no institution is safe, but if there’s risk everywhere, I’ve just got to try and minimize that as best I can. Fidelity didn’t give me any sort of scare that year fwiw. Disclosure: I’ve been using Fidelity for basically all of my money for most of my career now, including cash management.
Not parent but, what about this does not scream red bloody flag to you?
hand over their account passwords to them
Give my banking password to some other company? That's a red bloody flag right there. Stop the presses. Nobody should ever do that. Not outside of very specific use cases like a password manager and in that case there better be seventeen million levels of encryption and such in place.
for storage in cleartext.
Did we mention the color red? On a flag? I think we did. Cleartext, eh? Who thought this was a good idea?
Storage in cleartext would indeed be a huge red flag, but Plaid says they store it encrypted and I've seen no evidence that they are wrong about that.
That still might be a red flag but not as big a red flag. Cleartext means a database leak would leaks passwords. Encrypted, if done right, would mean a database leak would not leak passwords.
Can you share a link that describes what exactly they do?
What I would expect to be table stakes is that they only ever have an encrypted version of the data on their end (like a password manager) and that the encryption key is stored on my machine or if on their side that it by itself is protected by a passphrase that I have to enter each time plaid needs to do something. If we are talking storing the clear text password somehow coz they use screen scraping to implement their features for some banks.
All I find on their site (casually looking) is marketing fluff.
Also really I would expect that they never even need my password at all and that instead they have a proper API between them and the bank(s) where I authorize specific scopes only (preferably read only scoping being available) and my password stays with me and if something bad were to ever be done with a write scoped token from Plaid it would be traceable to their token authorizing it and they would be liable. When I give them my password they basically get full monetary power of attorney and the bank would always fault me ("we can see you logged in with your user and password. We tell you to keep your password/PIN secure and to never share it. Sorry, money gone".
Relevant section for the "we do store your password" case:
In other cases, when you link a financial institution to an app via Plaid, you provide your login credentials to us. We store those credentials and use them to collect the data to power the services you’ve chosen and, when requested, securely share it with the app you’re using and establish a secure connection that you control. We then help keep your data safe and private with best-in-class encryption protocols.
Meaning exactly nothing. "encryption protocols" may simply mean that when they log in to screen scrape your bank's online banking they do so over HTTPS.
Sorry but this has zero meaning and I maintain: Red bloody flag. If there's any actual proof out there of them doing all this in a secure way, I'm happy to have my mind changed but this is just part of said marketing fluff.
Like Synapse, this sounds like the "put all your eggs in our digital basket" style of fintech "disruption" is bound to blow up in the faces of everyone involved.
> Banking services provided by Evolve Bank & Trust and Thread Bank; Members FDIC.”
I just don't understand why on Earth it's legal to use the term "FDIC" one sentence away from "not a bank" without there being a regulatory framework defining minimum record keeping and reporting requirements to avoid exactly this type of failure.
The European "e-money" scheme seems to be exactly the opposite: Deposits are not insured (I believe there are requirements on the stability of the depository bank), but intermediaries, i.e. "financial technology companies", have to make detailed reports about their customers' balances available on a very short time frame to avoid exactly such problems.
Ideally, there would be a combination of both (pass-through insurance against bank failure and reporting requirements to reduce the blast radius of non-bank failure).
> but the FDIC has helpfully pointed out that no FDIC insured account has defaulted which is the necessary condition for FDIC insurance to pay out
This is what scares me. I use Betterment for everything, which strikes me as a much more legitimate company, but it follows the same model where accounts are "FDIC insured" by being distributed among various bank partners. I always thought that meant it was safe if the company had troubles, but it seems not.
I don’t think Betterment distributes funds to centralized accounts like Synapse does, it establishes accounts in your name at those partner banks and provides a unified interface over those funds. You can do the same thing yourself by going to each bank individually and opening up accounts manually, but then you’d have to deal with KYC for each one and their online banking interfaces of varying quality. That’s how they get their $2 million insurance number, since they open accounts at 8 banks and FDIC insures $250k per account.
That was my understanding when I looked into Betterment Cash Reserve (I ended up just going the manual route because I’m paranoid).
Good to know! Yeah I guess that's the inverse of the OP: one account spread to multiple bank accounts vs multiple accounts dumped into one bank account
> every time you deposited to savings you would get a free lotto ticket for the month based on how much you deposited
reminds me of a payment scheme someone in Poland described about getting a car on 'lottery', where every month one person 'won' the rest of their payments paid off as the prize, while the 'worst loser' paid twice the price of the car? i was pretty young so i'm sure i'm missing the details
I've had an account with them. It looks like in March they quit giving automatic tickets monthly based on funds. Now the app looks much more like a casino, with other games and a separate yottacash balance for playing games including the lottery that use to be automatic and based on cash in the account. Withdrawing isn't possible but it still shows I have a $400 balance. Evolve bank is sending me $0.06 based on my balance because of the synapse bankruptcy. I'm just glad I moved most of the money I had in it to a different bank a few months before the issues started, I had 10k in it at one point.
It looks like the drawings are still happening and it says someone won 33k this month. That's gotta be bitter sweet. They won big but probably won't actually collect the prize considering it's not possible to withdraw. I wonder if they are going to have to pay taxes on that prize despite it not being accessible.
Notably, they promoted this scheme to people with troubled finances and tried to morally justified it by talking about how they were encouraging people to save their money who otherwise wouldn't. In principle that sounds good, but the reality is they just funneled those people into a glorified casino.
Premium Bonds are quite a popular savings product especially in times of low savings interest. What I find interesting is that NS&I, being government backed guarantee the security of all money in their accounts across all products, well past the ~£80,000 obligation that banks have.
I like where your thinking and you seem confident, but history has shown this to not always be true. However, even if it does happen, people sitting in jail does nothing to fix the loss of the victims.
The fact that one of the parties involved hasn't done an audit of their accounts because "they can't afford it" is the chef's kiss of the clown show this debacle is.
Being a cynic means I also am confident someone will go to jail for financial crimes, but I am not confident that whoever does so will be the most guilty.
It reminds me of a certain country where one of the wealthiest powerful people set up a lottery system to persuade people to sign a petition espusong values of a politician well-known for not paying companies the full amount they're owed.
Force cannot transmit through the material faster than the speed of sound and because fundamentally at a subatomic level, mechanical force is the interaction of electromagnetic and gravitational fields between molecules, the speed of sound cannot exceed the speed of light in a material. The rod will compress or physics breaks down. Solid particles are an abstraction.
There used to be some pretty wild published advice on how to use a radial arm saw including ripping full sheets of plywood by walking the sheet across the cutting plane with the saw pointed at your stomach. They also travel towards the operator in the event of a catch because of the direction of the blade and the floating arbor. This makes positioning yourself out of the potential path of the blade critical and the one thing we know is that you can't trust people to be safe on a job site when they are in a hurry.
>There used to be some pretty wild published advice on how to use a radial arm saw including ripping full sheets of plywood by walking the sheet across the cutting plane with the saw pointed at your stomach.
So, similar to ripping plywood on a table saw, then? What makes one worse than the other here?
>They also travel towards the operator in the event of a catch because of the direction of the blade and the floating arbor.
So, like a modern sliding miter saw, then? What makes one worse than the other?
I have the original manuals describing how to rip using a radial arm saw. The blade is set at the level of your stomach and mere inches away from a spinning blade as you walk a sheet of plywood along it. There are so many ways for that situation to go wrong, and so few ways to make that situation safe. I have a beast of a radial arm saw, and I set it up to rip out of curiosity, and it would be insane to ever do it that way. It will cut your guts wide upon if you so much as slip.
And when that saw bites, and comes at you with enough force to be too much for you to react to. If parts of you are in the way, it'll rip right through them as it punches you in the jaw.
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