Posts by Bartholomew 476 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Dec 2013
And lets say that "fred bloggs" does setup a 5G cell on a frequency he should not be using and one of his neighbour has a heart attack, is actively jammed from calling emergency services by fred's setup and dies. Would that count as involuntary manslaughter ?
It may not be an issue with one "fred bloggs", but how about a thousand or ten thousand "fred bloggs" all in the same city.
> circuit board developed by Lime Microsystems
Technically the original XTRX board was developed by Fairwaves and not Lime Microsystems. The Fairwaves XTRX miniPCIe (From 2017 which is based around the Lime Microsystems LMS7002M 2x2 MIMO chip) is in the process of transitioning to be a member of the LimeSDR family of products. So I am guessing that Lime Microsystems reached out to Fairwaves to make a deal for their finished product, that they were no longer selling, or vice versa.
These two graphs show that it should be very soon (especially if money is no object).
https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/moores-law.jpg
https://jetpress.org/volume1/power_075.jpg
One it happens, the future will be truly strange.
The history of humanity has been linked to massive acceleration when a new communication media was invented:
books, you could learn information from people who were dead and spent their entire lives learning something.
printing press, many people could learn from others dead and living.
mail,
telegraph,
teletype,
telephone,
Radio,
TV,
satellite,
Internet,
email,
http,
...
The singularity will be different than all acceleration that has happened before, we live at an interesting time.
They do not pay taxes and would be immune to this. But you would be cutting down on the metadata that is available to them. They can legally buy metadata that is for sale, that is illegal for them to gather directly. So the tax money they currently spend could in theory be put to more productive uses, but they will probably still spend that money on other things (If you do not go over budget this year, you will probably have your budget cut the next year).
Imagine if every company who currently harvests metadata had to pay government tax or levy on every uncompressed byte transferred, and a second yearly charge for every byte of metadata stored or archived. I wonder how much that would reduce global telemetry. I suspect that it would be taxed out of existence.
But of course that would never happen, because far too many three and four-letter acronym agencies around the world piggyback on the metadata harvesting by commercial metadata aggregators to get around pesky little things like laws that should technically be preventing them from carrying out such action themselves.
Only people who make mistakes actually need an editor:
$ cat > testfile.txt
Hello World!
^D
$
Do it once, get it right the first time, no need for silly editors. Some may argue about the whole needle and butterfly thing ( https://xkcd.com/378/ ) but they are just bat$#1+ crazy, that takes far too much upfront planning and patience.
Is there any OS where a update can happen without a reboot.
Where the old current kernel is running on one hart/CPU, the newer kernel is running on another hart/CPU, both synchronise all data structures. The older kernel hands the conductors baton, once both sides are happy that everything is shipshape and bristol fashion, over to the newer kernel. And the newer kernel is ready to rollback time of all data structures and hand the conductors baton back to the older kernel if any problems are found. And if everything is well then the older kernel is fully unloaded from memory.
Am I missing something obvious ? The only real advantage I can see for lubricants is that they should be much much cheaper than HFE's. With almost no other advantages ?
When it comes to removing the hydrofluoroethers from boards for RMA while under contract or warranty it is simply a matter of dripping the board off and then evaporating off any liquid before shipping by raising the board to near body temperature.
When it comes to lubricants (petroleum based oils), returning a failed part under RMA is not really possible. And one major disadvantage for lubricants is that they are all pretty much flammable (may require a high temperature or a relatively low temperature with any accidental wicks).
Hydrofluoroethers are nearly all Non-flammable, their one big downside is the special handling required when eventually being disposed. This typically requires the fluid be shipped back to the manufacture for them to handle all legal, environmental and safety requirements when dealing with any poisonous by-produced like hydrogen fluoride (search for images of "hydrogen fluoride burns", but do it after lunch) and carbonyl fluoride produced during extreme heat thermal decomposition. But that is not something that will ever happen under normal usage, in a well designed system, since it will all evaporate long before the temperature and pressure would be high enough for that would happen. Even if the entire site was on fire (e.g aeroplane crash landing).
For example, 1-methoxyheptafluoropropane is Non-flammable, non-ozone-depleting, Non-corrosive, High electrical resistivity of about 10^11 Ω·m (roughly the same as glass). Boiling Point (@ 1 atm) 34°C (93.2°F). Freeze Point. -122°C (-187.6°F). Typically sold as 3M Novec 7000 Engineered Fluid.
> Sometimes the project bears no apparent fruit
The L.A.S.E.R. is probably the best example of that. Everyone though that it was a truly marvellous invention, but one with absolutely no applications whatsoever when it was invented. Now just over 70 years later, it is literally impossible to imagine what the world would be like if the technology did not exist.
So will the peak of anti-laser technology be gold plated missiles (gold has fantastic IR reflecting properties and does not tarnish).
Or the cheaper option - will future squaddies, as part of their intense training, be learning how to polish more types of metal than just their dress uniform buttons, medals and insignia.
TL;DR: Argon ? Sulfur hexafluoride ? Or something else ??
If you are going to super heat some gas that is stored as a liquid, what would work best (I'm guessing that you do not want to deal with a solid, because the second phase change would waste far too much energy).
I'm guessing that it needs to be a gas with a low molar heat capacity, somewhere about ~21 J/(mol·K) or lower, which would take Oxygen, Nitrogen and Hydrogen off the table at ~28 to 30 J/(mol·K). It would need to not be corrosive (so a noble gas would fit the bill well). Next question would be which would be better a higher or a lower temperature boiling point, I'm going to guess that higher is better that you need to use less energy to raise it's temperature before it leaves the craft forever. That would make the perfect gases Xenon (boiling point 165.051 K; −108.099 °C; −162.578 °F) Molar heat capacity 21.01 J/(mol·K) or Krypton (boiling point 119.93 K; −153.415 °C; −244.147 °F) Molar heat capacity 20.95 J/(mol·K). But if you needed a few hundred tons of the stuff something that is about 0.9340% of earths atmosphere might work out much much much much much cheaper to source - i.e. Argon (boiling point 87.302 K ; −185.848 °C; −302.526 °F) Molar heat capacity 20.85 J/(mol·K) ? Krypton is about ~0.000114% and Xenon is about 0.0000087% of earths atmosphere and insanely expensive to use by the ton.
Sulfur hexafluoride would probably be better than perfect (boiling point 222.3 K; −50.8°C; −59.4 °F) but for it's ridiculously high molar heat capacity of 97 J/(mol·K).
That URL should probably be https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot at a guess.
Behind closed doors at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, every imperial measurement is calibrated against the globally agreed metric standards. So even if the US population still use imperial units, the calibration for all industry happens using metric units. So technically the US are part of the global metric system.
How far away is it exactly ?
Like is it physically far enough away that the odd extra gamma ray or stray neutron from the reactor does not increase the number of Single-event upsets in a statistically measurable way. I would say that analysis of the log files after 10+ years could be interesting. Especially with the newest generation of chips.
By the way, I'm not pro or anti-nuclear, I just think it is an interesting question. The answer will probably never make it into any publicly published scientific papers, unless there is no statistically measurable difference. I'd still like to read that paper, if it was published, to see the control data set and test data set boundary conditions.
If you install "32-bit Windows 10" and disable all network access, will the OS be automatically deactivate after a number of months/years, or will it happily function until powered down during a few yearly factory downtime maintenance windows ? Basically will it be able to provide decent uptime if it is prevented from phoning home to upload its collected telemetry, while downloading patches, and automatically reboot at least once a month instigated by Microsoft. Will the storage slowly fill up with telemetry that will never be upload ?
Would you trust a machine running a Windows OS to fully control production machines in a factory ? Where downtime in the middle of a production run could end up costing you major contract penalties ?
The US ideally wants to keep all nations, not on their current friends list, at least 10 years behind in terms of technology. The real problem is that China (if you look at the number of published scientific papers), are not going to stay there for very long at all.
It is a numbers game the US has about 4.3% of the worlds population, China has about 18.5%. If you assume an even distribution of above average smarter people born globally, and factor in the current American immigration policies, that is not good to maintain a technological lead.
In terms of earths landmass the breakdown is Russia (~11.0%), China (~6.3%), Canada (~6.1%), USA (~6.1%), Brazil (~5.6%), Australia (5.2 %), ... would strongly suggest that the only country that could potentially have more rare earth elements than China, needed to manufacture advanced technologies, is not currently on the friends list of very many countries right now.
From a pure capitalist point of view blocking access to nearly one fifth of the worlds potential customers, makes little sense. So it is purely a military decision. That China is in the cross hairs as a potential future enemy. There are no winners either way.
BeOS could do this 27 years ago, always blows my mind, on a dual core pentium 2 @ 266MHz (They even disable one CPU core) with 64 MiB of RAM, a 3GiB HDD and two hauppauge video capture cards: https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=840
One problem about trying to create a news article would be that the key people involved (One that I know of in Australia and one in Budapest) will have been advised by their legal experts to say absolutely nothing.
And there was an article previously posted on Hackaday, so it would be extremely difficult to dig up any new information.
https://twitter.com/FoolsDelight/status/1591707060324163588
The creators of some advanced passive radar software, none of who were based in the US, deleted it from github, removed it from their Linux ISO on MEGA and basically took everything to do with it including documentation websites fully offline and contacted lawyers, once they were made aware that their source code might be in breach of ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations).
But github is based in the US and owned by a US company and that would probably be enough of a hook for an extradition order by the US government if they wanted.
(SDR is Software Defined Radio)
To operate does a SMR need an external source of cold (usually water) along with it's source of heat (fully contained nuclear fission of some type) and the temperature difference ultimately drives a supercritical steam/CO2 turbine which in turn spins a three phase electrical generator ? Or is it something else ?
I guess my real question is, does a SMR need to be located near a large body of water as a source of cold (like a conventional coal/oil/peat/gas/nuclear power plant). Or could a SMR be setup in say a desert and use geothermal cooling with a very large ground loop as the cold source. Or even use Air with a large enough surface area as the source of cold for the turbine.
I was using a borrowed VAX account at the time (was not in the right department to be granted an account), and I can remember accessing it in a room filled with second hand vt100 terminals, all of which had some stock company or bank logo etched into their phosphor screens. I do not think that I heard anyone at the time call it usenet, it was just "news" or sometimes you heard someone said check this out, on "NNTP", it is brilliant.
So not ?Eadon?
My source was the Internet Oracle, which I think I originally read on NNTP (rec.humor.oracle) in the early 90's:
> perpetual motion machines, where they still require a working model.
Has no one patented that yet, it is very simple. You get some toast, butter it and strap it to a cats back. Throw the cat off a building and it will levitate there spinning rapidly between butter side down and cat landing on their paws. Oh no, sorry I was thinking of anti-gravity. It you listen to any UFO you will generally hear a purring like sound, that is from the large number of moggies.
I guess you could have a sub patent of perpetual motion, since the cats and buttered toast are spinning. But in the real world, eventually the cats will lick the butter off the toast and then ...
There is so much Garbage in all training datasets used. It is hard/impossible to attenuate all the Garbage in and still be standing on the legal side of copyright.
To get this idea across imagine a tiny model that was trained with only data from public domain sources e.g. 60,000 books from "Project Gutenberg" (Started in 1971 when Michael S. Hart was given $100,000,000 worth of computer time on a mainframe of the era). But being out of copyright the language used in nearly all the books is insanely different to the language in common use today. You would still recognise the language used as English, just like you would recognise a 100 year old action/comedy film by Buster Keaton was an action/comedy film. But due to changes in society and technology it would be totally different to a slick modern action/comedy movie with Jason Statham/Michelle Yeoh/Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson/Jackie Chen/Robert Downey Jr. The cinematic language has changed and spoken and written language has changed because the world is a different place.
Getting access to a large modern dataset that does not totally ignore someone's copyright is nearly impossible.
I went to aliexpress and searched for Loongson, and there are still systems being sold. Maybe this global ban only applies to the latest generation and not the older slower hardware. Or not the buggy first revision of chips out the door (The A chips):
Loongson 3:
3A4000 (2019) GS464EV (GS464v) some boards on aliexpress
3B4000 (2019) GS464EV (GS464v) none on aliexpress
3A5000 (2021) GS464V some boards on aliexpress
3B5000 (2021) GS464V none on aliexpress
3C5000 (2021) GS464V none on aliexpress
3C5000L (2021) GS464V none on aliexpress
3C5000L-LL (2021) GS464V none on aliexpress
The other downside of water in the primary loop of a breeder reactor is that the hydrogen will absorb many neutrons. It is one of the reasons why high neutron flux is bad for anything living. It is the reason why sodium or even Sodium–potassium alloy (NaK) is used as a primary coolant in experimental fast neutron nuclear reactors.
One really nice thing about CO2 is that it can be supercritical at only 31°C (being supercritical it has almost all the properties of a gas, but with the mass and similar density to that of a liquid).
Carbon dioxide becomes super critical at a critical temperature of 304.13 K (31.0 °C; 87.8 °F) and a critical pressure (7.3773 MPa, 72.8 atm, 1,070 psi, 73.8 bar).
Water becomes super critical at critical temperature of 647 K (374°C; 705 °F) and a critical pressure (22.11 MPa, 218.4 atm, 3210 psi, 221.1 bar ).
Although for the secondary loop a supercritical fluid is critical to use to minimise corrosion and wear and maximum the useful lifetime of the turbine blades. If the isotope problems are solved I'd love to see CO2 in both loops.
I think super critical CO2 could be interesting. But then you would end up producing daughter isotopes of Fluoride from the Oxygen and Nitrogen from the Carbon and other isotopes depending on the exact decay chains. And those elements might need to be continuously removed from the primary loop to prevent a build-up, which could be complex. And new CO2 added. Fluorine azide (FN3) may form which is readily capable of detonation or explosive decomposition at normal temperatures and pressures (The consequences would be similar to effect of nitroglycerin, chlorine dioxide, nitrogen triiodide or TNT in the primary coolant loop). Studying the long term chemistry involved with multiple isotopes and all decay chains inside actual test reactors could take years. Simulation would be faster, but before commissioning an actual reactor, tests would still be needed to verify all the expect theoretical results matches the real results under all conditions.
On paper they are fantastic. But "All told, the world’s governments have poured more than twenty billion dollars into breeder research and development. All that money has produced no proven technology for “breeding” new fuel, and not a single breeder plant was up and running at the turn of the century." - The main problem with all the test reactors is that the sodium in the primary loop always ends up leaking, and then you need to SCRAM*.
* "The central question to be addressed by the scientists (In Manhattan Project’s research team) was whether uranium was capable of a sustained chain reaction. This was proved by Enrico Fermi, the Italian scientist who in 1938 had travelled from Rome to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for his experiments with radioactivity. Instead of returning to Mussolini’s Italy, Fermi took a boat to the United States. Four years later, he led a team of scientists that achieved the first sustainable nuclear chain reaction with uranium, in a makeshift laboratory set up under the stands of a football field at the University of Chicago. (Even then, the scientists were fearful of what they had unleashed. One of the men on hand, Leo Szilard, said, “This day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.”). The chain reaction took place in a small reactor, which Fermi called an atomic pile. One of the control rods made of cadmium—which blocks neutrons, which are used to split the uranium atom and initiate the chain reaction—was attached to a rope over a pulley and suspended above the reactor. Should something have gone wrong, a scientist named Norman Hilberry was to cut the rope with an ax, thereby dropping the cadmium rod into the reactor and, it was hoped, halting the chain reaction before a meltdown occurred. Hilberry’s job title was Safety Control Rod Ax Man; hence, ever since then, an emergency nuclear-plant shutdown has been called a SCRAM." The quotes are from Ken Silverstein's book "The Radioactive Boy Scout - The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor" which was about David Hahn (October 30, 1976 – September 27, 2016) R.I.P.
I suspect what you actually meant was a molten salt reactor and not a breeder reactor at all.
THz have a problem going through water, so it will be mostly naked skin that is seen, since synthetic or natural fibre clothes and hair are nearly fully transparent to RF at those frequencies (unless wet, then it would be opaque). I can see a new line of fashion, either carbon (atomic number 6), or aluminium (atomic number 13) fibres embedded into underwear. But no tin(atomic number 50), it is far too high up on the periodic table, way too heavy for clothing! Can't use Magnesium (atomic number 12) either, for the obvious reason. Any RF shielding could be problematic if flying though, security would ask you to strip for your scan.
One of the problems with Terahertz security body scanners is the requirement that the target/object/human be lit up with a THz RF source (50 GHz – 0.7 THz, typically 100 GHz or 275-305 GHz is used for scanners). But with 6G everyone will be carrying around their own personal RF source (275GHz to 450GHz, amazing overlap with security body scanners). I wonder how long until someone strips down a few 6G phones and makes a see through clothes scanner from the bits and pieces.
And the worst joke ever is:
Q: Why do female programmers hate COBOL ?
A: Period missing. Period assumed.
Background that you need to understand (yea I know, always bad when a joke needs an explanation), the most common warning message for all new COBOL programmers is:
COBCH1014 Period missing. Period assumed (You have omitted a period in a place where one is expected by the rules of COBOL syntax. Your COBOL system has assumed the period is present.)
And do not get me wrong I think COBOL is bloody fantastic, it has been about since 1959. I always think about the late "Grace Hopper" when I hear COBOL and smile. She was very influential in the creation of COBOL, was such a fundamental person in history of computers and she always made me smile when I heard her talk.
If you want to sell lots of servers, selling clients will help to make sure that happens, because then people buy in to your software and hardware ecosystem. I managed a couple of hundred Sun sparc servers and a few thousand Sun sparc clients in the 90's and 00's. The customers needed a rock solid development environment that was similar to where the products would be deployed. Big projects, lots of developers, lots of testers, and so much documentation and as projects neared their end the numbers of meetings increased exponentially. People squeezed work in between meetings (during if it was a teleconference) to have an update for the next scheduled meeting that day. It was in interesting way to keep people updated and projects on schedule.
I see that as why, in my mind anyhow, it has taken so long for ARM to end up in the server space, there were no proper ARM development clients. And I know people will say you can login to remote servers or use emulators, but there is real feedback to programmers who can probe out the strength and weakness of hardware. e.g. A thing one developer noticed was that by simply rearranging the paths of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variable was that they could boost compile times by 50%. Another developer noticed that two SunBlade 1500's (hers and a colleague in the same office, that were both delivered on the same day), compiled at amazingly different speeds - one finished a build over night, and the other was still going until lunchtime (and both had full duplex gigabit). In the end, once everything else was tested and eliminated, it was eventually traced back to Sun increasing the L2 cache in later revisions of the CPU used.
That really does depend on if the energy required for full ignition is linear or exponential. The volume of a sphere is (4*π*r^3)/3. Either way it is still progress towards a fusion engine. But it is the key component for a "totally clean" neutron bomb (everything will be highly radioactive for a very short period and then because all the inorganic property is fully preserved new people can move in).
"Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory director Harold Brown and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev both described neutron bombs as a "capitalist bomb", because it was designed to destroy people while preserving property."
From BBC news "And although the experiment got more energy out than the laser put in, this did not include the energy needed to make the lasers work - which was far greater that the amount of energy the hydrogen produced."
From the video 2 megajoules in, 3 megajoules out.
But watching the video, after hearing Mark Adams the deputy administrator for defence programs talk, it almost sounds like a pure fusion weapon might be on the horizon. Basically why demolish a city when you can just exterminate all life with a "clean" neutron bomb.
"They have goals to keep the funding"
Reading that statement, it is clear that you have watched none of the videos on youtube by Ivan Godard, his team brings major innovations to CPU's. Best case he gets hardware out the door within the next couple of years, worst case the patents are sold to intel/amd/arm/IBM (there would be a bidding war). But one thing is clear, that for more performance at lower power this is a direction that will eventually be taken by someone (IPC: one mill core is 30 instructions per cycle, for comparison x86/x64 Intel or AMD is about 4 instructions per core per cycle).
No LLVM support (yet), that does not mean no C compiler.
The problem with LLVM was that is was designed to support "normal" architectures, being so different than how everything else works has its downsides. But the lower power, more processing power can at least attract some customers who will pay for more. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory comes to mind, (insert missing decrypted "Three-Letter Acronym" here) would be another potential customer.
Mill architecture tried to get LLVM working but just found bug after bug after bug, so in the end they gave up (due to time) on LLVM (for now). They had to make a decision are they a hardware company or a company that submits an insane amount of bugs reports (and patches) and, for now anyhow, they are focusing on the hardware.
One way to look at it, is that their first patents (that I can find) were filed in 2014 (They are up to about 37 patents now - I think), they have to have products on the market well before 2034, to maximise the capital gained from their government granted monopoly. Ivan has said many times he is in it for the cash. They are running out of runway fast, so I suspect it will either be very soon, or else they will cash in their patents. Since they have not cashed in their patents (yet), I read that as nose down to the grindstone. They have invested a massive amount of energy into automating the design and testing of their processors. And they have prototyped them on FPGA's (Field-Programmable Gate Array), so it will either be very soon or never. But once they have locked down their RTL (Register-Transfer Level), with a complex new design it can still end up taking 2 to 5 years to move, via debugging, from an initial spin to fully working silicon ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) chips that are good enough to sell.
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