Posts by Jaybus

What will the factory of the future look like? Let's start with Intel, Red Hat, and 5G

Relevant is the key, isn't it? The problem is that the relevance of a sensor varies over time. For example, I don't need my hearing to type this, however if a fire started in my building then hearing the alarm would become relevant very quickly.

Two sides of the digital coin: Ill-gotten gains in cryptocurrencies double, outpaced by legit use – report

The Chinese government already banned mining over the load it places on electricity generation, if not specifically for CO2. That's harder to accomplish for less dictatorial governments,

Bitcoin 'inventor' will face forgery claims over his Satoshi Nakamoto proof, rules High Court

Re: Old Nicknames

Yes. It was always a pyramid scam. And in all such scams, the early "investors" are rewarded in order to propagate the belief in its value.

US Army journal's top paper from 2021 says Taiwan should destroy TSMC if China invades

"China's need to re-absorb Taiwan is deeply idealogical rather than motivated by economic considerations. "

I doubt that. All previous land grabs in human history have been over money and power. Why would this one be different?

Why your external monitor looks awful on Arm-based Macs, the open source fix – and the guy who wrote it

Re: Amazing....

My experience is that I plug in two monitors (of any type) and ... it just DOES NOT work.

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

Re: Far from ordinary

Whether the theft is a misdemeanor or not is dependent on the cost of the stolen goods, so I have to guess that the cost of 30 MOD AAs is well into the felony range.

ESA's Solar Orbiter sails safely past Earth despite orbiting debris concerns

Re: 10,000ths of a radian per second

The force needed to accelerate something at 1G is dependent on something's mass. The Solar Orbiter's mass is 1,800 kg, so acceleration at 1G would require close to 18,000 N, not 100. Acceleration at .5N thrust would be less than 0.0003 m/s^2, so about 0.00003 G. It is a very tiny thrust.

NASA boffins seem to think we're worth saving from fiery asteroid death so they're shooting a spaceship at one

Re: Impacts are not always bad

Well, there is evidence that the Chicxubu impact actually triggered the supervolcanoes that occurred at roughly the same time. Something like a bullet striking a melon. So, no reason we can't have both at the same time.

AI algorithms can help erase bright streaks of internet satellites – but they cannot save astronomy

I'm not so sure about that. Trenches to install fiber in is not a problem, but that is a lot of fiber to install.

In any case, I think the rural America market is a target only in that they can collect subsidies for it in the early stages. Once up, they can sell to everyone and I would not at all be surprised if urban users exceed rural users in short order. Think about it. One service that does it all, wherever you go, even during international travel. Internet and cheap mobile communications for every commercial ship from shrimp boat to giant cargo ship. Same service in your car, wherever you go, etc.

Re: Painting them black ...

They're all busy inventing the battery that never needs charging.

Cisco requires COVID-19 shots for all US staff – even remote workers

Re: how to prove it

Yes. Perhaps we need der Ordnungspolizei to make sure that everyone's papers are in order, eh?

'We will not rest until the periodic table is exhausted' says Intel CEO on quest to keep Moore's Law alive

Re: "two advanced chip factories in Arizona"

Most of Arizona's water comes from Lake Mead, formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River on the Arizona-Nevada border. It is the larges reservoir in the USA by volume.

Re: "progressing along a trend line to 1 trillion transistors per device by 2030"

They are related, though. There are 3 factors to CPU power consumption, dynamic consumption, short-circuit consumption, and loss due to transistor leakage current. Dynamic consumption is a function of switched load capacitance, voltage, and clock frequency, so is directly related to clock frequency. Short-circuit consumption is also dependent on clock frequency. Leakage current consumption is dependent on supply voltage.

Re: "progressing along a trend line to 1 trillion transistors per device by 2030"

Yes. The PowerVia tech is a power plane below the transistors that allows both direct power to the transistor (through a via below the transistor) and essentially eliminates a voltage drop. It also frees up space in the interconnect stack above the transistors to allow for relatively larger interconnects to reduce resistance and capacitance between lines. The result is the ability to switch faster, so we may once again see a more significant bump in clock speed with 20A.

Apple arms high-end MacBook Pro notebooks with M1 Pro, M1 Max processors

Re: Performance claims

Yes, and it won't be increased past 64 GB until TSMC's 3 nm node is ready. That is the trade-off with the UMA approach. Certainly, Intel, Samsung, and others will produce unified memory chips in the near future, but I think it has a limited lifespan due to the scalability issue.

Another concern with this approach is cost. Each new node is becoming increasingly more expensive. The price of a 300 mm wafer constructed at the 5 nm node is US$16,988, whereas the cost of the same wafer at 7 nm node is US$9,346 and at 10 nm it is US$5,992. The pattern suggests that the production costs are nearly doubling with each new node. A 300 mm wafer constructed at 3 nm will be approaching US$30,000.

Re: eWaste

Ummm...all of those manufacturers sell laptops and workstations with Linux preinstalled. So, yes, indeed they are.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Well, that is how cultural revolutions in China, the Soviet Union, Libya, Iran and elsewhere have ended up in the past, so I would guess the answer to be yes.

UK.gov presents its National Space Strategy: Space is worth billions to us. Just don't mention Brexit, OK?

Re: "putting rocket boosters the size of a Saturn V's F1"

"F1's aren't needed anymore. They were meant to send the entire giant Apollo stack to the Moon in one go."

Really? Because commercial aircraft are much larger now than in the Apollo days due to the fact that the use of larger aircraft improves overall fuel efficiency and reduces man-hours for flight crews. Same reason a dump truck is used to move gravel rather than 50 or 60 trips in a Mini.

Texas law banning platforms from social media moderation challenged in lawsuit

Be careful what you wish for.

Re: Fog of War

Ummm...the states have always had electoral commissions to review election results. In Tennessee it is called, unsurprisingly, the State Election Commission. It is made up of 7 members elected by the Tennessee General Assembly and may have at most 4 members from the current majority party. They have a page at https://sos.tn.gov/products/elections/state-election-commission and are not secretive. Where did you hear the conspiracy theory that you're talking about?

Re: Monopolies

If one company has a monopoly on peddling twits and another has a monopoly on peddling faces, then they are still indeed monopolies.

Re: Forced speech

"The first amendment prevents the government from making laws which abridge the freedom of speech or the freedom of the press. Twitbook is not the government."

Ah, but neither are they the press, due to the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and that is the crux of the problem. As an "Internet company", the CDA makes Twitbook and Facer immune from lawsuits based on their user's content. If they take an editorial role, then are they still an "Internet company", or are they press? Why do Twitbook and Facer get immunity, but the NY Times does not? For that matter, if they are not the press, then do they have a first amendment right to freedom of the press? And that begs the question, is the 1996 act itself contrary to the first amendment? The "Internet companies" seem to have been placed in a strange no man's land where they have sovereignty in their own not-so-little digital kingdoms.

Re: Censorship

Yes. It is the difference between a speaking a lie and lying by omission.

Measuring your carbon footprint? There's no app for that

Re: Within limits, more CO2 would be better than less

Under the water category, I would think an increase in atmospheric water would cause a corresponding increase in the Earth's albedo due to cloud cover. The reflection of solar radiation by atmospheric water would be more significant than its ability to reduce black-body radiation. An increase in atmospheric water would more likely decrease surface temps.

AI caramba, those neural networks are power-hungry: Counting the environmental cost of artificial intelligence

Re: "we're not doing enough to make AI more energy efficient"

"I is probably written in an abstracted high level language"

Worse. They are mostly written in Python.

Re: A language processing model might be able to understand

To be safe, perhaps we should just vote with paper ballots.

Re: Human alternative

Let's be more generous than that. Dogs are among the most intelligent beings on the planet. I'd be willing to call it AI if it approached the intelligence of a frog, regardless of power consumption. Consider, though, if it were possible to dedicate 100% of the processing power of a frog brain to a single task. I feel certain it would be capable of, say, driving a Tesla.

It's really just a multi-dimensional linear equation, right? xM = y, where x is an input vector and y is the output vector. M is an unknown matrix. Training involves presenting a set of x for which y is known, and it is repeated until xM, for some set of x, is within a defined error margin of the corresponding set of y. The training is statistical, but not the end use. Once trained, that is the coefficients in M are calculated, it could certainly be deployed on a Raspberry Pi as well.

Re: machines and entropy

Oh, no. beast machines continue to be optimized by natural selection. Also, the beast machines are optimized by trial and error, just like the silicon ones. And if one considers the millions of years it takes to optimize beast machines, I'm not sure how energy efficient the process is.

Amazon says Elon Musk's wicked, wicked ways mean SpaceX's Starlink 2.0 should not be allowed to fly

The Chinese state-owned company GW is also putting up a mega-constellation. So it isn't just a US orbit-grab, if that makes you feel better.

Australia rules Facebook page operators are legally liable for user comments under posts

Re: Out of curiosity ...

And that straightforward precedent is based on the common-law principle stated in the article:

"...that every intentional participant in a process directed to making matter available for comprehension by a third party is a 'publisher' of the matter upon the matter becoming available to be comprehended by the third party."

So, why did it stop with the page admin? Certainly Facebook is itself an intentional participant in that process by providing the media on which the matter is made available, and so Facebook, too, is a 'publisher'.

This case could be a huge issue for Facebook in the US (which also has a common-law legal system). If ruled a publisher, they would lose their 'platform' status exemption under the Communications Decency Act and be treated like every other publisher. In other words, they could be sued based on content, including third-party content.

Personally, I think that perhaps this was the only decision the High Court could make, given the Australian laws, but it is a horrible decision for free speech. It will effectively force page admins to simply stop allowing comments in order to protect themselves.

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

Well, there has to be, doesn't there? Even in human written languages punctuation is a necessary thing. We need to delimit individual thoughts/concepts. For example,

It's time to eat George would you set the table

Is that:

It's time to eat George. Would you set the table?

or is it:

It's time to eat. George, would you set the table?

We could define rules for writing it without the commas, by say requiring a EOL instead of a period and EOL + indentation for a comma.

It's time to eat

George

would you set the table

But it is just trading character codes. How does that make it less error prone? And wouldn't this just be a more COBOL-like version of BASIC?

Can we talk about Kevin McCarthy promising revenge if Big Tech aids probe into January insurrection?

Re: Not really.

"when only white men who owned property could vote"

That would be the early 19th century. It wasn't until the Third Reform Act in 1870 that all male house owners were eligible to vote in the UK. The US had comparatively liberal voting laws for the early 19th century.

US boffins: We're close to fusion ignition in the lab – as seen in stars and thermonuclear weapons

Re: Self sustaining

Ignition and breakeven are two very different concepts. In the ignition experiment, they are concerned with simulating the radiation driven inertial implosion that occurs in a thermonuclear weapon. So they are really only concerned with the energy output as compared to the x-ray radiation generated. Ignition is the point at which sufficient heat is generated and briefly confined that, were there more fusion fuel, it would result in a runaway reaction, or in other words, it would "ignite" a thermonuclear explosion.

By contrast, the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) is a US magnetic confinement experiment and is similar to the Mega Ampre Spherical Tokamak (MAST) experiment being conducted in Oxfordshire, although both of those are a bit behind the Joint European Torus (JET) experiment. These are energy production experiments, so are more concerned with the breakeven concept, or the ability to generate a net energy gain in a controlled manner.

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

Re: Memory

The 8088 had 16-bit address registers and a 20-bit address bus. So apps had to utilize memory in 64k blocks of a 1 MB address space. Actually, IBM reserved 384k of the upper 1024k address space for BIOS and I/O, so apps had to use the bottom 640k of "conventional memory". EMM and such were kludges to expand beyond the 1 MB address space by taking advantage of the segmentation. As an ISA card, they occupied a range of addresses in that 384k of reserved space. The cards mapped their onboard RAM to one or more 64k blocks of the card's assigned address space in that reserved area so that the 8088 could address it..

Re: "What a piece of crap"

I worked with CompuPro S-100 systems in an analytical chemistry lab as a comp sci student in 1981-1984. They had a Tektronix 4010 graphics terminal and I was working on a couple of projects with chemistry grad students who fought over the 4010. Prof. Ridgeway managed to get us a IBM PC with the CGA card. His idea was for one group to use that and the other the S-100 and Tektronix terminal, but all of their work thus far had been written for Microsoft's FORTRAN compiler and Z80 assembler. He instructed me to "get them up on the IBM as quickly as possible". He had in mind to translate the code from to something that would run on the PC. But I took him at his word and wrote a Tektronix 4010 terminal emulator in a mix of Microsoft Basic and MASM, the only two compilers we hod for the PC at the time. He was angry when he found me out, but fortunately I had it mostly working by then. Funny thing is, the PC made for a faster graphics terminal than the actual 4010 and then they fought over who got stuck with the 4010. So, my first experience with the PC was to use it as a terminal connected to a "real" computer. After all, it did have the best keyboard I've ever used.

Google staff who work from home might see pay cut under corporate policy – reports

Re: WTF?!

So Google wants to make more by reducing costs. Of course they do, and that is reasonable. What is not reasonable is denying their employees that same profitability. Google is claiming that since the commuting and other non-reimbursed employee expenses are reduced, Google is entitled to those savings too, in addition to the savings they will enjoy from smaller or less office space. WTF, indeed!

Ch-ch-ch-Chia! HDD sales soar to record levels as latest crypto craze sweeps Europe

Re: Too late

Yes, but rest assured Mr. Cohen has the lion's share of it. Same as any other crypto currency....a digital Ponzi scheme.

Right to repair shouldn't exist – not because it's wrong but because it's so obviously right

Re: re. companies don't publish schematics is that you cannot copyright the wiring of components

Not really. Chip manufacturers always publish reference designs. When designers with different companies use the same reference design as a guide in their product design, there is likely to be similarities and overlap. There are only so many ways to connect the chip. Nevertheless, that doesn't stop lawyers from using that overlap in trying to claim infringement. It's not self-incrimination so much as self-defense in a litigious World that would make a corp not want to publish.

The more likely scenario is that at some point company A decided that hardly anyone looked at the schematic and it cost too much to publish it. The others decided that if company A didn't have to, then neither did they. And no corporate conspiracy theory is required to explain it.

Re: Spot-on analysis

For some odd reason, there are those who don't appreciate being told to limit their energy usage by people who use ten or a hundred times more energy than they do. It's the governmental micro-management that doesn't sit well. If you are about making things fair, then wouldn't it be better to limit household energy usage? No doubt many deeming themselves green, but living in a mansion would balk at that. But just limit the household usage and if people want to use their allotment playing games, then I say.....have fun!

The UK is running on empty when it comes to electric vehicle charging points

Re: Hmm....

And don't forget that more than half of that electricity is coming from burning fuels, mostly natural gas. Yes, yes, only 38% is from gas and 1% from oil/coal, so some have claimed that renewables have for the first time overtaken fossil fuels. I suppose that is technically true, however 12% of the total is from biomass, and renewable though it may be, it is nonetheless another carbon-based fuel that is burned.

Not saying that EVs aren't a good thing, just that powering them is nowhere near zero emission. A bigger question is where is the needed additional electricity going to come from?

Europe mulls anonymous crypto-wallet ban, rules to make transfers more traceable

Re: Being in the wrong

Criminals follow the money. For example, Mexican drug cartels have moved heavily into human smuggling, (and human trafficking), particularly smuggling people into the USA. This is primarily due to the pandemic making it harder to get supplies from China needed to make methamphetamine and fentanyl, but also due to lockdowns. Idle hands and all that. The blood money has to be laundered too, you know!

In the '80s, satellite comms showed promise – soon it'll be a viable means to punt internet services at anyone anywhere

That's not entirely accurate. The US is 11th in fixed broadband, 25th in wireless...on par with France and Switzerland. The difference is that in the US bandwidth is extremely disparate. Populous cities have very fast internet and rural areas have....well, none, or almost none. Rural areas have 5G and 4G only along major highways, otherwise some have grandfathered DSL The USA is abandoning copper too and new installs are generally not available. The LEOs should be a huge success in rural America.

Wanted: State-backed bandits planning cyberattacks on US infrastructure. Reward: $10m

Re: I would have thought..

Perhaps in NYC and other large cities where the majority already walk or use public transit, but in the area affected by the pipeline shutdown, the more typical 20 minute commute by driving turns into a 4 hour or so walk. All good for who?

Boffins boast of 'slidetronics' breakthrough enabling binary switch just two atoms thick

Re: I have to wonder....

Umm, they didn't say just two atoms. They said two atoms thick. The two sheets together make a single switch. The switch requires far fewer than the million or so atoms required to make a transistor, but still several thousand atoms, most likely.

Treaty of Roam finally in ashes: O2 cracks, joins rivals, adds data roaming charges for heavy users in EU

Re: If it's not on the side of a bus...

Well, I believe that we've missed it.

John McAfee dead: Antivirus tycoon killed himself in prison after court OK'd extradition, says lawyer

Re: Why was he in a Spanish prison?

A US citizen still has to pay the taxes where they live. The taxes paid to other countries are deducted from what they would owe to the US (known as Foreign Tax Credit). If they live in a country with lower taxes than the US, then they will owe the US the difference. If in a country with higher taxes than the US, then they won't owe anything, but are still required to file a return form. Most end up in wealthier countries with similar or higher taxes, so it really is not that onerous.

Three things that have vanished: $3.6bn in Bitcoin, a crypto investment biz, and the two brothers who ran it

Re: BCCI

I suspect in both cases the criminals who were laundering money, errr I mean principle investors, there were fleeced by the criminals who were doing the laundering. If they were/are ever found, we still will not hear from them ever again.

Say helloSystem: Mac-like FreeBSD project emits 0.5 release

Re: The UI

Oh yes! The Jackintosh. So named because it seemed it would be a cheaper knock-off of the Macintosh, Atari being lead at the time by Jack Tramiel, who headed Commodore through the Pet, Vic-20, and Commodore 64 years and was famous for ultra low cost consoles.

Re: The UI

Isn't that how a written language works? We have been using the symbol 'A' as the first letter of the English language for centuries. A red traffic light means stop. Are you saying that its been red for so long and now that we have LEDs we should think about changing it to a shade of purple. The floppy icon for save has only been used for a few decades. It's not old. It's practically brand new.