Posts by Tom 7 8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
When I was a kid we had manometers in most towns storing coal gas - a mixture of flammable and and inflammable gasses which set to feed the local town cooking and heating and suicide facilities - it had levels of CO high enough to make it easy to bump yourself off. I know of no lightning induced associate with manometers.
As a storage method its extreemely cheap and even though 50% H2 coal gas never seemed to have this imaginary leakage problem that's been going around of late.
why does the idiot try and move the border closer to NATO? As others have pointed out Russia has already lost, pretty much like Japan lost because the 4 aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbour were out on manoeuvres - its was only going to work if you got it right first time. I do fear Trump getting in though, if he does I can foresee a Russia and US 'alliance' against the world apart from China. We will need more grassy knolls.
Had a chat 40 odd years ago with a bloke who did microwave waveguides. He was quite convincing about how superconducting just required waveguides in the 'crystalline' structure to be large enough for the electrons to scoot down without touching the sides. Of course as temperatures rise the waveguide shrinks and as distances increase the likely hood of thermal interference by the waveqgude increases.
I'm thinking its possible to make crystal that works in one lab and gets their hopes up and yet wont play in another. Of greater concern is making these things work of useful distances. Labs seem happy with several orders of magnitude less than something useful being a superconductor when it would fail to be one over a cm or two.
Early FO experiments were done with hollow tubes. Different coatings on the glass (graphene of course) may work.
Given most of the markers are pretty meaningless (OK not the db bits. But a card door slam? What kind of can and how hard - slightly or wife just found you getting a blow job in the car hard? Ditto baseball bounce on grass, from hand or smacked by a pro etc etc And I'm assuming the value for the plane is at its cruising altitude, what about when its a lot closer to the ground and driving its engines at full power to get up there.
And as for son of Concorde - not even close until its big enough for a lot of passengers when I imagine it will be a lot louder.
I'm interested to see the results but I'm not sure it will make a commercial plane or even something for the military - by the time its radar proofed its going to be loud again,
I'm not personally convinced AGI is really that complex. Our brains are complex largely because we have lots of things to manage and evolution has got things working but I'd bet not in optimal ways - just ones that were better than what can before. I think we can learn an enormous amount from analysing and emulating the brains of 'lesser' animals simply from the way they are wired together. Removing the parts require to run, develop and organise a complex organism, and the learning process that seem to take over 20 years to configure a human brain we can probably develop a functional AGI that can be on a chip and pre-loaded with various models to see how it functions. The thing is humans and society are slow in evaluating things so even when we have something that works there will probably be 100 year battle as to whether its used for individual capitalist millionaires or for society as a whole. With the billionaire idiots of the type we have now I see them ruling the roost and we will have this bizarre situation where access to intelligence will be restricted (like twitter) to stop you proving them wrong.
I worked on 2.4Gb FO chips in the late 80s - one of my work mates had a 9.6Gb FO receiver working from some 'test' chips we had made. I could send 2.4Gb/s 10km with an error rate of 1 in 10**14 when pretty much the biggest hard drive you could get was 40MB. Kinda weird thinking you could fill your hard drive faster than a dial up modem could connect!
And 33 years later we have twitter having to limit the number of reads of small paragraphs of text its users can share. You can explain this to the 'leaders' of modern high tech let alone your grandmother.
I was gobsmacked when I managed to get two computers to talk to each other down a null modem serial cable when network cards were > £300. Before that networking seemed to expensive to be part of personal computing. After that open standards seemed like the way to nirvana. And they still are.
Check out ROOT (from CERN) C++ interpreter.
Having said that I tend not to worry about what language I'm writing in if I want speed as that tends to come from the routines I'm calling and what they run on ( a couple of graphics cards if I need some speed) Writing a new language is always a tricky thing when you can RTFM of pretty much any computing language and find a solution to the problem you naively think you are the first to come across!
WWW is a subset of the internet. email is a subset of the internet etc etc. IRC was a subset of the internet. Nothing ever said WWW couldnt access email or IRC. It was just there were programs that people were familiar with that held sway for quite a while, even though the clients were easily re-written to work in the browser, well until MS and others decided to make it difficult,
Then the Internet came, and we got to do everything all over again.
Then smartphones came, and we got to do everything all over again even though we didnt have to.
Then web services and the cloud came, and we got to do everything over again because we didnt realise we'd done most of it already.
Nobody you knew was predicting this in 1975 - we'd have needed the web for that.
When ferreting about inside PC cases even today I keep my forearms bare and touch one or other to the bare metal of the case and keep it there before diving in. Never trusted leads as deliberately open circuit ones where left around the labs by Mr Funny in one place I worked. Except of course when training in which case the avo came out to check.
leaving me at a much higher security level than I had as a user. We used a VAX 8600 with VMS and originally we only had a couple of dozen engineers using it and then someone decided to put 120 secretaries doing word processing on it. This meant that during the day jobs that used to run in just a few minutes could now take hours. There was a program on the system that crashed almost as soon as it was run and one day I'd discovered that it left me in some kind of admin level so I could raise my job priority to near max and the job would whizz along and finish in seconds before anyone could complain or seemingly track what I was doing. I didnt do it very often - generally when I needed to finish the job before a meeting or pub o'clock on a Friday but it saved me many an hour of finger drumming.
One scone jam first, one cream first. If you're still hungry involve butter for 6 more permutations to try.
I am intrigued by the cornish idea that the jam will slide the cream off which shows they've not testes the idea since jam became conserve and wont even stick to a knife let alone slide clotted cream off. My next door neighbour makes clotted cream for their neighbours at xmas and despite my lactose intolerance its so good I can cope with some cramps and near terminal flatulence to consume it. However straight from the fridge there is no jam that will shift it, indeed a nice scone is under threat from it if you try a large lump without some softening of the cream first.
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