Posts by Bartholomew 573 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Dec 2013
> no good open source swap for Photoshop or Illustrator, Xcode or Autocad (to pick a few names)
Photoshop -> GIMP
Illustrator -> Inkscape
Xcode is for macOS, so how does that relate to Windows 10 ?
Autocad -> librecad (2D) and freecad (3D) or BRL‑CAD (Been about since 1979, used by the U.S Military. BRL originally stood for "Ballistic Research Laboratory")
What was that thing the orange one did during his last term in office ? I think it was that he created something new, well merged a lot of existing stuff together and called it something new. What was it called, was it "United States Sea Force", no that does not sound right, maybe it was "United States Land Force" no that is not it either, and it is not "United States Air Force". I'll eventually think of it when I'm not thinking about it.For now I'll talk about something else and maybe it will pop into my head.
The funding for NASA always reminds me of their history backwards:
A tiny space agency with no ability to self launch anything into orbit.
A medium space agency with their own space crafts to launch objects into low earth orbit.
A large space agency who landed the first humans on the moon!
Do not get me wrong brontosaurus rocks as a standard measurement unit.
But the gross mess in getting that last 0.2647 is just disheartening. And you could spend years sharpening the blades used and still fail miserably to do better than 0.26 brontosaurus. And then there is the whole amber and gene splicing thing, the less said about that the better. And I am not going near the whole age issue and everything that surrounding that.
My suggestion to minimize the some of the issues would be to only use whole healthy brontosaurus that are at least 40 year old. And just avoid all fractions. If you are dealing with fractions of brontosaurus, you should be using a smaller unit of measurement.
I like to call them DDT (And I do not mean Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane which was a potent insecticide used worldwide for agricultural and public health purposes from the 1940s until the 1970s)
Dumb Donald's Tariffs.
(Although to be fair he is probably far more toxic, and doing more damage to the world than the insecticide ever did)
Surely this should be deployed first at the Palace of Westminster, where the biggest criminals in the UK congregate ?
Or is the possibility that innocent tourists will be truncheoned by the police in public too great in such a place. Where the odds of false positives would be exponentially higher due to the greater crowd density. Maybe a few politicians getting truncheoned, might help stop this stupid idea from gaining traction, is the reason why it is not being deployed there.
> The result is you see fewer ads.
It is also that you are now using less bandwidth. It will not be much, but even if it is only 1% of the bandwidth on each and every webpage that means that the page will load 1% faster because you are not wasting packets, that you are paying for, downloading text and images that you did not want in the fist place.
In the not so distant past the Linux kernel was 99.9% C code (There is some assembly language for various architectures for various reasons), and most developers only needed to know C.
Now key people in the kernel validation and approval process need to know C and Rust.
At some stage in the, not so distant, future - at the current rate of assimilation by Rust developers the whole kernel will be refactored and be 99.9% Rust. And most kernel developers will only need to know Rust (until something better comes along, and this process is repeated).
In my mind, would it not have been faster and simpler for Rust developers to just create their own super memory safe OS from scratch in Rust (well 99.9% Rust, I'm sure that there would be some assembly required), that has a Rust based kernel, a Rust based bootloader and Rust based userspace applications. And because it was so much safer than Linux it would be the OS of choice by everyone who cared about security. Although even a 100% memory safe OS would do nothing to prevent human stupidly and basic social engineering (or memory security being bypassed from "custom" ME/PSP code).
Amazon only has a decade to milk the crap out of their exclusive franchise. There will be an explosion of 007 media and products pumped out over the next 10 years.
So I predict that ALL of the above ideas will be scraped and padded out into scripts!
This block by TSMC, means that the SG2380, will probably never be (unless SMIC can step up to the plate). And I was so looking forward to a 16 core RISC-V board with up to 128 GiB of LPCAMM2 memory in a Mini-ITX form factor that could playback (4k@30fps) videos encoded with the AV1 codec. But at this stage, it will be obsolete by the time that it eventually makes it to market (if it ever does).
P.S. The title of this post should be vocalised in the style of Douglas Reynholm from The IT Crowd yelling "Father!"
Hypervisor as standard is fantastic, now we just need HBI software (Basically similar functionality and more than is currently provided by the OpenSBI, but for a Hypervisor Binary Interface instead of the Supervisor Binary Interface - a standard interface that provides access to machine mode from the supervisor mode across all RISC-V chips).
OpenSBI was initially created by Western Digital Corporation, I wonder who will create OpenHBI.
Another article here is "Intel, AMD team with tech titans for x86 ISA overhaul" where they have solicited the help of Broadcom, Dell, Google, HPE, HP, Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, as well as individuals, including Linux kernel-dev Linus Torvalds and Epic's Tim Sweeney. This makes me wonder if maybe speculation is a dead end, and needs to just go the way of the dodo. What happens if you remove all the out of order and speculation and allocate the saved resources to increase the core count by an order of magnitude of really simple secure by default dumb cores.
I'm thinking back to Windows NT 3.51 that ran on x86/MIPS and Alpha, where the drivers, including graphics ran in user space for security (and stability - you might see a message where the graphics driver had crashed and was restarted just like any other user process could be, instead of a blue screen of death - or a red screen of death - there are options to change the colour). The downside was that this did have lower performance, but the increase in performance for other operating systems was paid for with much weakened security. My rule is: "If a program can crash an operating system, it can probably be used to own the box".
We need to end the race after performance, and go back to the fundamentals. In the battle between security and performance, security should win every single time - there should be zero compromise. And if the saved resources can add 10x the numbers of basic cores, the overall performance hit should be minimal. If we get to the stage where every application has one or more dedicated cores, it will probably make a lot of things much simpler. And simple is the friend of security, complex has always been security's arch nemesis.
Never mind I found the answer
https://cva6.readthedocs.io/en/latest/06_cv64a6_mmu/riscv/priv.html
HEE->HBI->Hypervisor->SBI(multiple)->OS(multiple)
instead of:
SEE->SBI->OS
Because the number of customers are so low, the profit margins are so low that the capitalists do not bother. And buying them from a communist country for a super low price, means that to verify the parts are to specification, it is as simple as randomly selecting some in every batch and destructively examining them under a microscope.
Intel's 14th generation was October 2023 (fabricated using Intel's Intel 7 process) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake
Intel's 9th generation was October 2018 (Intel's second 14 nm process node refinement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Lake
So China is 5-6 years behind the current western chips ?
No mention of telemetry ?
Well obviously the telemetry. I mean, the telemetry goes without saying, doesn't it?
All right, but apart from the GUI, the networking, WSL, .NET, unwanted background processes (wasting power), unwanted install time applications, telemetry and their current CEO, what else should Microisoft remove (or at least make optional) for us?
> Most importantly though, this initiative will hopefully help keep shelves supplied
You speak of the supercomputer that is to come after the (RRL) rapid response laboratory supercomputer. A supercomputer whose merest operational parameters no one is worthy to calculate. A supercomputer that can calculate the logistics requires to fly drones to deliver toilet paper (one roll at a time) to all who need it (and answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything) ! And the RRL supercomputer shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called…the Earth 2.0. No sorry I mean skynet, no *ponder* maybe dronenet.
If all 4 cores could run at once and all shard the exact same memory, I wonder what fun could be had learning RISC-V+ARM "multi-architecture executable code" or "Fat binary" or "multiarchitecture binary". Basically each program has a tiny machine code stub in front that on one architecture is harmless junk instructions followed by a jump to native binary code, and on another architecture is harmless junk instructions followed by a different jump to native binary code. Basically you need to understand the machine code of both architectures at a binary level to create that tiny "stub" once and then reuse it. Was popular with "Multi-architecture shellcode - shellcode targeting multiple platforms"* , but with the dominance of x86/x64 has mostly vanished. It still exists, but is obscure knowledge.
* (ref: phrack.org issues 57)
Looks Like I skipped the
Intel Sierra Forest 6766E and 6780E have a 144 core count and the Sierra Forest-AP should be able to support up to 288 cores.
The cache in the above chips are interesting:
L1 13.5 MB
L2 144 MB
L3 108 MB
Especially when compared to the AMD (128 core) chip above:
L1: 64 KB (per core)
L2: 1 MB (per core)
L3: 256 MB (shared)
Intel's cache sizes look very weird.
X64 is at the 128 mark (e.g. AMD 9004 Series Processors)·
ARM is soon to the about the 512 mark (Ampere AmpereOne Aurora 512 Core).
RISC-V has no public hardware with a hypervisor yet (The Milk-V Oasis, with it's SG2380 has not shipped and they were recently asking potential future customers if they wanted the boards to ship with unpopulated LPCAMM2 module sockets that can be upgraded OR soldered down LPDDR5X chips). But then you see some total silliness like SERV with 10000 RISC-V cores ( https://corescore.store/ ) and you start to think that in the near future some actual production high end RISC-V processors might end up with a totally silly number of cores (and a hypervisor). The SG2042 will have 64 cores and has to have a hypervisor, but it is probably a year away from an initial test run in a fab.
I guess what I am saying is that even though ARM is in the lead, followed by x64, my guess is that due to licensing costs that RISC-V might jump into the pole position sooner than you might expect.
My guess for the SG2042 would be that it might be based around an opensource XiangShan V3 (goal: 16.7 SPECint2k6/GHz, current simulations with RV64GCB: 14.7 SPECint2k6/GHz) core - which was developed and validated in China.
> That they're going to use CPUs instead of GPUs?
I would Look to the SG2380 for some inspiration as to what is planned, It has 16 general purpose 64-bit P670 RISC-V CPU's, four X280 co-processors and each of those co-processors manage dedicated SOPHON TPU hardware (32 TOPs int8 and 16 TFLOPs fp16 in total per SG2380). It does have a GPU (Imagination AXT-16-512 GPU), but it would be a very poor choice for processing anything other than graphics.
China's plan is to use TPU's instead of GPU's.
A supercomputer would probably be based around the 64 core SG2042, but there is not enough details public about it yet to make guesses.
good lighting conditions 24/7 - check
high quality roads - check
simple traffic flow on roads - check
multiple years worth of preexisting training data sets - check
location for maximum shock and awe to international business partners - check
I do not believe that the actual local cab drivers were factored into the choice at all.
Can I just take one second, to say lower voltage means lower current, and lower current means it takes longer to activate/deactivate transistors. In other words Intel's solution is to lower their average clock rate in some of the clocks used. But of course that is not going to generate good PR, so they have used lower voltage, which is technically correct, to hide the solution.
Now I'm not saying that there will be drop in average performance (because in modern CPU's enough parameters can be tweaked to disguise this e.g. make the peak clock used higher* and lowest clock used higher), but there will probably be a drop in efficiency.
*higher means that thermal overload will be reached much faster, and then the device will need to be under-clocked for longer to cool-down. But application startup times will feel faster (or the same, in the case of this workaround). It will also reduce the useful lifetime of the product, but as long as it is outside of the warranty period, that is not really a concern for Intel.
> Not everything is a conspiracy
I 100% agree, but Fourteen Eyes does exist ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes ), so does Lawful interception ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception ) which can be and has been misused and the Snowden leaks has shown most people a lot more than they thought was happening in their name.
If conspiracies were my bag, I would have surely posted as a tin foil hat wearing Anonymous Coward, and not use an account where you can read all my previous posts - I would be so paranoid.
I'm more into actual facts rather than fiction like:
The NSA using apparatus in Denmark to spy on European politicians such as listening to Angela Merkel phone in Germany!
Or the whole NSA Greek watergate as it was called at the time, where every leader had their calls tapped ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%9305 )
I personally do not believe in any lizard people. And as for George Soros, I actually had to look him up on wikipedia just now. I've heard the name somewhere possibly once, but knew nothing about him.
The real problem is that all the US owned ones green light all US backdoor code by FISA court orders with gagging, where as Kaspersky red lights the same. And if you think about it that is the real reason, the potential Russian backdoor is the excuse, but the end game is to take Kaspersky off the table for every country around the world. The US is a big consumer market and want to remove funding, if the funding drops low enough the hope would be that a US company can buy the codebase (Forced via a FISA court order with gagging) and "update" it to US standards.
Mass: 61000000000 kilograms (assumed) according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis
so 40666666.6667 skateboarding rhinos according to https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
The real problem is that you can not calculate it's exact mass until it interacts with other objects of known mass.
> 375 meters wide – the length of 30 giant squid
I'm unhappy with this, there is not enough information about the squid used to make accurate predictions using monte carlo analysis. So I'm going to convert it to a more manageable 68 to 88 giraffes.
Background information:
male giraffes range from 4.8-5.5 m tall
female giraffes range from 4.3 to 4.8 m tall
I'm going to change "375 meters wide" to "375 meters tall", so about 68 to 88 standard giraffe units!
The icon is me using a slide ruler.
> I wonder what they did with my kids print info?
Absolutely anything that they want to do, with absolutely anything that they want.
Ever since the Walt Disney Company began work on the Magic Kingdom near Orlando in the late 1960s, the Mouse, as locals call it, has wielded considerable political power in the state. A law enacted in 1967 makes it totally legal for the company to build and operate a nuclear reactor on its property south of Orlando proper. Disney World its own tightly controlled governmental entity with its own laws. Disney has the power, to create its own police force, it has not so far. Florida as a state at that time was not used to dealing with so many powerful attorneys, so basically they granted them everything that they asked for to sell that cheap swampland.
> No such thing as "AI".
An artificial general intelligent (without imitating nature) should require, multiple orders of magnitude, fewer resources than would be required for the current human brain simulation efforts.
An lot of money has been invested into (destructively) scanning dead brains, and simulating them. And the tipping point is just about now for human brains.
Look at the graph (click on it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain#Approaches_to_brain_simulation ), 2024-2025 is when simulation of a human brain is technically possible. But yea it is totally infeasible, it would need the power output from a medium to large country 24/7 just to fully simulate one human brain.
So I do agree that there is no such thing as an "AI", an "AGI" may exist today, or tomorrow.
I do not expect that there will ever be an AGI PC, but it would be cool having a brain in a box, like Orac ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_of_Blake%27s_7#Orac )
"Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum" was published by Prentice Hall, and it does contain a lot of Minix source code. But yea I would not say that Linus copied the source verbatim, but it did help inspire him. It was a very important book.
"... claims that Linux was initially illegally copied from MINIX. Tanenbaum published a strong rebuttal, defending Torvalds"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate#The_Samizdat_incident
I use to work with an elderly man who used to go for walks on the beach in the evening after work to clear his mind about the crap he would have to deal with all day long. And he would listen to a FM radio. Life was great.
Then one birthday his girlfriend bought him a brand new DAB player, which he thought was fantastic, amazing sound quality compared to FM, so after work he would walk along the beach and at the exact same point along his walk his new DAB radio would go silent. He attributed it to the DAB needing crazy amounts of power. So he turned off and the next day he would start his walk with a new set of batteries, and at the exact same spot every single day ths new DAB radio would go silent. So he turned it off and put it away, and finish his walk in silence. He just could not understand how his old FM radio would last for months on a single set of batteries and DAB just drained them so fast.
Of course it is obvious to anybody what was happening. The batteries were fine, but his life experience was that if the radio goes silent the batteries are dead, you need to replace/recharge them. What was in fact happening was he was reaching the outer limit of the DAB transmitter and the DAB radio unable to use the FEC (Forward Error Correction) codes because they were so weak would just go silent. He turned off the radio and would not power it back on again until he had bought replacement batteries, or recharged his batteries! And he replaced them inside an area where the FEC and DAB transmissions were both fine. So in his mind new/recharged batteries always fixed the problem!
About a year later he was explaining how fantastic the sound quality was from his DAB player was but that it really eats through batteries like crazy! And he explained how it would always die at the exact same spot along the beach every single day like clockwork! It was outside of his life experience, and nit his fault. He got real mad when I explained what was happening, and that all those batteries he had recycled/recharged were probably all nearly fully charged.
> Certainly not my employer... security is an unnecessary cost, not an advantage, according to them.
I think many look on security like Ad*be used to (not sure if it is still the case or not). People do not pay us for security patches, they pay us for new features that they can use to make money. It is in our terms and conditions, we are not responsible for your security, or any losses you may make or profits that fail to make they are not our problem. Security is not at the core of our business, why should we need to invest money where we will never see a return on that investment. We will create patches when paying customers report issues, but we do not need to be proactive - that just wastes money that could be used to pay bonuses to management for record profits!
I'm guessing that he has received funding from someone involved in ships. But I saw ships and though that is a bit out of place.
But maybe he is thinking that a drone operated ship is sent to a designated bad country and the onboard drone manufacturing plant starts generating drones to decimate the military population.
The icon is him checking his pockets for that brown paper envelope campaign funding contribution from the ship builders in his district (Michigan's 2nd congressional district - a land locked area).
NSFW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFGDPwsTX34 - Billy Connolly: Demands
Almost every single spy agency around the world will be seeking access to all electronic devices in his environment until the day he dies.
He will probably seek out somewhere in Oz that is the equivalent of the "United States National Radio Quiet Zone" for privacy.
EDIT: I just found it the " <a href="https://www.atnf.csiro.au/projects/askap/ARQZWA.html>Australian Radio Quiet Zone WA (ARQZWA)</a>" (check out the picture, it looks to be in the middle of nowhere).
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