Posts by Death Boffin 201 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2008
It is interesting what IBM is doing. They sold off their foundry business to Global Foundries when they decided it was uneconomic. Then they got bent out of shape when Global Foundries decided that developing nodes smaller than 14nm was uneconomic. Now they are having a go with the Japanese. Which is interesting, because the Japanese had decided that keeping up with node reduction was uneconomic. Something tells me they will be buying from TSMC in the near future.
That generative AI uses previous artists' work to make images does not appear to be any different than any human art student. They study the Masters' techniques, styles and composition to produce their own art. The fact that there is a genre such as Anime shows that some amount of intellectual property has been copied from one place to another. But if a computer does it, it is different for reasons.
There is a relatively cheap way of deorbiting these debris. It involves a high power ground based laser. The problem is that it is also a first class anti satellite weapon. It could even take down a Musk sized satellite constellation. The first one built will ignite an arms race.
Given the deep biosphere here on earth having life thousands of meters underground, I could see life on Mars still being there after billions of years.
It is also quite possible that it has the same DNA. There has been quite a lot of cross contamination due to meteor strikes over the last few billion years.
Dell tower computer in the office, under the desk in a dark corner. The on/off button is a 1cm flush mounted thing, the same color as the rest of the case. It does helpfully light up once you turn the computer on.
Much fun trying to refuel a rental car. Could not find the release button for the fuel door. Turns out it was in the glove box.
The problem is that I am looking for a robot Jeeves. I earn $60,000 a year. I would need to hire 3 humans to perform that task 24/7. But you want any humans doing that to have a living wage. It is not economic. If I could get a $60,000 robot to perform those tasks (3X Musk's dream), I could afford that.
The problem with specialized robots is that you need so many of them. I don't have space in my home for a cooking robot and a vacuuming robot and a toilet cleaning robot and a laundry robot and a dish washing robot and a handyman robot and a gardening robot and a shower cleaning robot and a window washing robot and a nurse robot. Specialized robots work well on an assembly line where they do the same thing over and over. There are very few tasks in the home that fit that description.
By the time you add up all the specialized robots you need, the cost is going to exceed that of of a robot Jeeves. It will also use much less resources. This is why you will want a humanoid robot
This still won't fix California's problems with summer power. When that big high parks over the west, even the offshore areas don't get much wind. It also brings in monsoon clouds that block solar production. The additional heat and humidity drive up demand. That is why Governor Newsance is keeping Diablo Canyon in operations.
The business machines company I worked for had a Chinatown butcher as a customer. We supplied them with adding machines and a support contract. Retrieving broken machines from there was a horror story. Indescribable critters hanging from hooks in the back. Indescribable stuff on all surfaces. Indescribable coating on the adding machines. A thorough scrub down with isopropyl was necessary before even thinking about repairs. The support contract was quite lucrative though.
"Transporting electricity intercontinental distances is rare, the longest interconnector in the world is 450 miles (UK<->Norway)."
The Pacific Intertie begs to differ. It is a DC line that travels 846 miles from the Columbia River to Los Angeles. The only reason it isn't longer is that there isn't a cheaper source of electricity further away.
One of the problems with EU consortiums is the concept of work share. This is where each country gets a piece of the work. I recall a semiconductor fab where the work up through the gate process was done in one country. Then the wafers were packed up and sent for the remainder of the processing in another country.
This manufacturer maintained a consistent half decade lag on US and Asian manufacturers.
Back in the days of yore, I was the delivery boy for a business machines company. I indeed hauled many Selectrics into office towers. The beast however was the Adler. Weighed about 50% more in the same footprint.
These were also the days of liquid toner in copiers. The suspension fluid was highly flammable. Many offices used it by the gallon. I'm surprised there weren't more fires.
DARPA is mostly run in that fashion. Most of the program managers are on sabbaticals from universities or industry, or on tours from the military or other parts of the DoD. There are a few political appointees at the top. The institutional memory seems to reside in the SETA (System Engineering and Technical Advisors) contractors.
Speaking of restrictions, all of this is predicated on the availability of chipsets suitable for industrial use – think microcontrollers and that sort of thing – that actually support this generation of wireless communications.
There seems to be a cognitive disconnect here. Why would a microcontroller need to support a multi-gigabit communications protocol? It would seem that they need a more reliable Bluetooth. Something I would welcome.
Gyrotrons are big. They need large magnets in order to work, so you won't be fitting one down the borehole. That means you will have to direct the microwave energy down the borehole.
The gyrotrons produce mm-wave energy. That means having to pipe it around using waveguide. Waveguide is quite lossy at those frequencies, so you need to do trickery like quasi-optics to keep losses low. This needs finely machined and polished waveguide pipe, which is very expensive.
When you get the energy to the target, you have to deal with the vaporized material. This is one of the problems with beam weapons. You puff off a cloud of vapor and immediately your beam starts heating the vapor instead of the target. So you have to get rid of the vapor, some 20km away.
Finally, you have your hole and can start producing steam. You can't run that steam directly into a turbine. It has a lot of nasty silica and acids in it. These tend to clog up the pipes. The local geothermal plant periodically cleans the scale off and sends it off for reprocessing because it has significant amounts of gold in it. So yo you need to have a heat exchanger. Only then can you produce power.
Given these difficulties, this may work sometime, but don't expect it soon.
Innovation in the US military moves with the speed of contracting and security. In other words very slow. In cases where troops in combat need something, procurement regulations are waived and things are much faster. Why this can't happen for regular procurement is that too many rice bowls would be broken.
The only saving grace is that this process is still faster and more efficient than our adversaries'.
Icon: The desired outcome of the process.
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