Posts by StargateSg7 518 posts • joined 12 Jul 2017
That Windows OS is NOT a piece of crap software --- LINUX is a piece of obtuse unusable CRAP-load of coding bilge! And I've got over a 100+ OS'es to play around here with and I like Windows 10 Enterprise and NextStep the best in terms of speed and ability to get things done!
For command line work, VAX VMS just kills everything else even today in 2021!
For the Esoteric stuff I still even like GEM (Graphics Environment Manager) on the old ATARI ST machines! AWESOME OS and Also IBM's WARP4 (I still run that one at home for my fancy older gear!)
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Anyways, in terms of Bill and Melinda Gates relationship, ANYBODY who has a few billion dollars will be pulled, left, right and centre from all parts of the world and by MANY corporate agencies and media enterprises which will strain and damage almost EVERY marriage!
The ONLY reason guys get married anyways is to get some kids on a legitimate basis.
Once the hot and sexy robots that look like "Number Six" (aka Tricia Helfer actress playing female human-looking CYLON robot on Battlestar Galactica Reimagined), humanity is TOAST cuz many if not most nerdy and beta guys will go for the hot sexbots. Mating with a hottie and REALISTIC looking/acting bot will be every wet dream of the average nerd and beta guy. Even a built-in artificial womb is not out of the question for the "Hot Bots". I give humanity another 20 years before A.I. and realistic human-looking and passable feeling robotics becomes easy enough to build that a $10,000 USD price point is probably where the market will explode!
I have to say this, but when that happens, many if not MOST women will be relegated to buying their own male sexbots or just have to make do without human males as sex and/or life partners!
CHEAP and Super-Sexy A.I. robots are humanity's DOOOOOOOOM !!!!!!!
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Like I said in my earlier comment, we kept punching right through the orbital mirrors! 20 Megawatts is only 42 or so petrol engines worth of energy BUT that amount of energy still punches through EVERYTHING -- mirrors included -- We solved that issue BUT we ain't using mirrors ....... ;-) ;-) ;-)
We're doing it the old fashioned way to redirect LASER and MASER pulses -- PLENTY OF TEMPORARY MASS !!!!
and for those of you in the know, I think you get our drift ..... !!!!
...
They were firing 20 Megawatt LASERS in 1987 already during SDI (Strategic Defence Initiative aka Star Wars) ICBM defence systems research. (How do I know this? -- relatives worked on it and that portion is now declassified!)
20 megawatts is only 42 piston engines from older 2010-era lorries (i.e. Ford F-150 trucks) networked together and about $10,000 USD worth of normal 91 octane gasoline (petrol). Here at BC Hydro, I am paying 10 cents a KW/hr and that 20 Megawatts is had from typical Run-of-the-River dams which we bulk lease.
LOTS of Hydro Electric power here in British Columbia. 20 Megawatts is NOTHING here!
We could TRY to use mirrors to move and re-direct a 20 megawatt LASER, but having the SAME problems the original SDI researchers had where the laser would punch through the orbital reflecting mirrors (Ooops! Did I just say that publicly? -- Orbital SDI laser reflector/re-director mirrors in 1986-to-1992?), you are correct it is line-of-sight only for now!
BUT since I have that REALLY FANCY 65,000 objects per second PER GPU fully autonomous vision recognition system I designed and coded, we can obliterate whole armies AND shells-in-air or ICBMs in mere microseconds!
meh!
Just another day at the office!
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It is as easy-as-pie to MAKE a rudimentary gun (i.e. a device that fires a solid or hollow projectile) but i't a whole'n'other ball of wax to make it fire consecutively in safe and sound manner for a reasonable period of time!
Again, I like our modern equivalents, LASERS, MASERS and Particle Beam weapons which are basically UNSTOPPABLE by even the thickest and strongest armour once a certain energy level has been reached!
A 20 Megawatt LASER has no defence against it. It can slice through 200 feet (60 metres+) of solid steel or solid rock! People are INCINERATED TO CLOUDS OF ASH in mere seconds even with full body armour on them!
It is the ULTIMATE weapon after Nuclear Bombs and Quantum Dynamic devices!
And with multiple summing of the monochromatic waveforms, I can get energy levels into the Gigawatts,
enough to TOAST ENTIRE COUNTRIES in mere minutes!
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Using a CHEAP Bay-bought Chinesium-made 3D printer to make a gun is just ASKING for trouble!
You need about 1/10,000th of an Inch (0.00254 mm) of machining accuracy in making a GOOD 3D printed gun (i.e. typical 9mm or 0.45 pistol) that won't blow up in your face and AT LEAST use 4140 or 4150 grade Carbon Steel for the upper (i.e. the main bullet-firing parts) to ensure longevity and strength.
You need GREAT quality CNC machine gear and the knowledge and shop-experience to follow all the small details needed to get a finished product. ANYONE CAN make a 3D printed gun from plans found on the internet, but SHOULD you if you don't have great quality CNC machines and high quality base material and some decent shop skills? NO! Just don't if you still want to keep your hands' and face intact!
I would actually suggest making yourself a high-quality cross-bow and/or compound bow and arrow kit! It's a LOT safer and easier!
If you have some solid hunks of metal laying around, you COULD make yourself a real but miniaturized CANNON which I think is safer too! Firing a solid steel ball using cotton and gunpowder is just as deadly for the target and the BOOM a cannon makes is quite satisfying in itself!
Me? I would rather use the parent company's 20 Megawatt Chemical Iodine/Oxygen LASER to burn really BIG HOLES in things in mere hundredths of a second! Plus it has an unlimited range going to the moon in only 1.25 seconds! I could also wipe out an ENTIRE ARMY in a few tens of seconds at 20 Megawatts pulsed using advanced vision recognition targeting!
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An to think JUST ONE of our GaAs combined-CPU/GPU/DSP super-chips is 19.2 PetaFLOPS sustained at a full 128-bits wide for Floating Points, Fixed Points, Integers plus RGBA, YCbCrA and HSLA pixels !!!
We still win!
meh.
We almost ready to go fully public with our fancy super-chips, Megawatt battery systems and non-ICE-based / Non-Turbine-based flight propulsion systems!
v
Ya'll talking about good-ole BC/Alberta-based Canadian Me? aka StargateSG7
I'm more bombastic than BOB and I definitely hide our "Real Good Stuff" from the world, AND you only need Double-D's, some cases of Asbach Uralt Brandy and a cherry red Ford F-450 Superduty Dually to corrupt me!
I'm not a Tory but rather BIG-"L" Liberal and for the North American win, I know how to use the semi-auto AR-15, full-auto M4 and my trusty BMG .50 CAL ...AND... I put 37 inch NITTO tires (Tyres?) on the F-150 Raptor 4x4!
Then I drink 30 year old Scotch out my Calgary-made Cowboy Boots but live and breathe the Skiing-SCUBA Diving-Mountain Biking-Beach Bum Vancouver lifestyle including the BLISTERING and eye-watering $2600 CDN a month rent in a 1.5 bedroom Alberta-oil-patch-millionaire-owned condo who will eventually sell it for $2.3 million CDN dollars and then kick me out after his upcoming renoviction notice which I will protest loudly on some local beach-side avenue along with the rest of the great unwashed hordes of my fellow NIMBY NDP (New Democratic Party) and Green Party voter blocs!
After which, I will drown more of my Vancouver renoviction sorrows in locally-made 20% fortrified wine mixed with pineapple juice and downed with ten slices of avocado toast!
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Meh!
v
Our High-end Combined CPU/GPU/DSP gear
(made in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada):
a) TWO THz 128-bits wide Combined CPU/GPU/DSP Superchip
b) Gallium Arsenide Substrate (GaAs) on Borosilicate Glass
with active Microchannel Fluid Cooling
c) Native 128-bits wide for Floating Point, Fixed Point,
Integer and RGBA/YCbCrA/HSLA pixel values
d) 131072 by 131072 item at 128-bits wide per operand SIMD/MIMD vector/array
processor built-in for fast frame-based video, audio, DSP, GPU processing operations
at one frame latency or maximum 1/100000ths of a second per frame at multi-stream
10,000 fps DCI 16K video input/output plus audio and metadata.
e) Built-in DSP and GPU for multi-frame DCI 16K 1.89:1 aspect ratio video input/output
at up to 10 000 fps hardware-based recording and playback with one frame latency
SIMD/MIMD low-pass, high-pass, average, median, min/max, notch and multi-parameter
range-limit filters and 2D-XY/3D-XYZ CANNY and SOBEL edge detection for Floating Point,
Fixed Point and Integer values. Intraframe and Interframe CODECS are hardware-accelerated
and flash-upgradable microcode! 250+ accelerated DSP/GPU and Video/Audio/Still Photo
special effects and filters. More can be loaded on-board as flashable microcode!
Pixels can be RGBA, YCbCrA, HSLA at up to 128-bits wide (32-bits per colour and alpha channel)
16 full-duplex video stream input/output channels at FULL-RAW, 2:1/3:1/4:1/5:1 Compressed-RAW
or interframe/intraframe DCT or Wavelet compressed for up to 16-layers of FX/Filters/Compositing
in real time!
f) Built-in Audio I/O and sample processor at up to 64 channels at 192 KHz at 32 bits per sample.
Built-in MIDI controller software and 64 MIDI I/O ports.
g) 16 channels General Purpose IO at 160 Gigasamples per second simultaneous each channel of 32-bit wide samples to separate memory layer for asynchronous operations from rest of processor.
input and output is up to 5 volts at up to 750 mA PER I/O LINE (fused). VERY Handy for advanced SDR, vectorscope/waveform processing and signals monitoring!!!
h) Ultra-high precision clock and hard-interrupt timer module for 100 Picosecond accuracy for ultra-precise event-based function handlers and time-based triggers.
i) built-in 3D-XYZ orientation mems sensor at micron-levels of rotational accuracy on each axis.
h) Built-in SDR radio module for multi-frequency, wideband communications (80 GHz bandwidth Nyquist sampled up to 16 channels send and/or receive)
i) Custom-designed built-in Software Defined global positioning module with potential accuracy down to two millimetres RMS X (Long) and Y (Lat) and 8 millimetres RMS on Z axis (Elev). Software-enabled GPS, Galileo, Glonass, Beidou positioning algorithms can be loaded/flash upgraded at any point.
j) On-board 16-connector Dense Wave Multiplexing Fibre Optic Transceivers for inter-chip and multi-node networking and packetized communications and/or external storage media connections -- Multi-Protocol low-and-high-level stack TCP-IP/ATM/SONET/SDI/Ethernet/etc) via SDR-based on-board flashable microcode.
k) on-board Software-defined encryptor/decrypter accelerator. Symmetric and Asymmetric Encryption/Decryption Algorithms can be loaded and hardware accelerated at will with keys kept separate from every other memory region and thread process, accessible ONLY via hardware-secured and well-named ASK/VALIDATE/AUTHORIZE//SEND security-server pipelines!
L) On-board stacked non-volatile storage working as both ultra-fast system RAM and as local cache/storage. Has sub-nanosecond latency at 32 Terabytes onboard the multi-layered combined-CPU/GPU/DSP super-chip substrate! Can be segmented into complete separated and fully SANDBOXED and ENCRYPTED memory regions for Hypervisor and Virtualized Client OS operations.
M) hardware accelerated ASCII and UNICODE character string search, string indexing and multi-character processing functions.
N) Extended-state Boolean processor with ABSOLUTELY_TRUE, LIKELY_TRUE, POSSIBLY_TRUE, BOTH_TRUE_AND_FALSE, NEITHER_TRUE_OR_FALSE, POSSIBLY_FALSE, LIKELY_FALSE, ABSOLUTELY_FALSE, UNKNOWN_BOOLEAN_VALUE, INVALID_BOOLEAN_VALUE, BOOLEAN_STATE_NOT_AVAILABLE, BOOLEAN_EVALUATION_IS_DEFERRED,
SKIP_BOOLEAN_EVALUATION, IGNORE_BOOLEAN_RESULT status values and operational states to allow for advanced expert systems and artificial intelligence-oriented applications development and deployed runtime applications. Handy for creating "Digital Neurons" !!!
O) Fully ITAR-free hardware and software that is designed and manufactured ENTIRELY in Canada!
using 280 nanometre multi-electron-beam based line-etching process via GaAs on Borosilicate for maximum IP-68/Milspec 810-G combined CPU/GPU/DSP-package ruggedness and maximum self-cooling ability!
It will be priced MUCH LOWER than AMD Epyc or Intel Next-gen server processors!
WE WIN!
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After running Linux and Linux apps for literally DECADES now, Windows Server and Desktop are STILL a waaaaaaaaaay better end-user experience for working professionals in ANY occupation! There is just soooooooo much that makes proper and ocmmon sense in Windows over MacOS, iOS, Android, etc.
Just the simple WINDOWS FILE MANAGER is so obvious to me yet I can only get a REALLY GOOD ONE on Windows itself (or on our own internal OS software!). Just because I have o spend $60 USD for a per copy Windows 10 Enterprise site licence does not negate the fact that I am SAVING thousands of USD per user per year NOT having to go over and explain SUDO or command line piping parameters MULTIPLE TIMES to people who just want to install programs and make backup copies of their documents or name their external disks in a meaningful manner! Hmmmmm spend $60 vs a few thousand PER USER in support costs -- What would YOU do as an IT admin or CTO?
When Linux developers FINALLY get their over-swollen programming-oriented heads out of their derrieres, they can FINALLY GET OVER the fact that Microsoft actually DOES MAKE GREAT OS software and end-user applications! Don't try and beat them! JOIN THEM and make some money for yourselves while you are at it!
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With regards to the USS Nimitz-based Navy Pilot photos (i.e. the Japan and California ones), since I happen to know a LOT about the specs of the FLIR camera system used (i.e. it was low resolution SDTV quality) i was STILL able to see the pitot tubes and the remote aerial control antennae jutting out the side of the tic-tac ufos. AND based upon the screen information they were only going around 350 knots so it wasn't actually that fast and the quick maneuvers are technically a "false" viewpoint because the motion is RELATIVE to the moving chase aircraft. These are NOT true alien ufos.
Plus on ONE of them, you can see a still hot fuel door emitting IR and the usually light-red stripes that outline areas where repair and maintenance personnel are NOT supposed to walk on the craft. That grippy sand-paper-like surface changes the infra-red signature slightly so when I ENHANCE the video, I can see those obvious strips and the typical large warning lettering which is NOT Cyrillic or Chinese lettering --- it's blurry but I can tell its block lettering! DEFINITELY NOT an alien craft!
I am assuming they are cooling the exhaust in some way, so I am guessing the engines are INTERNAL turbofans that jet cooled air to the outside via hidden ports allowing the jetted air to be cool enough that the FLIR camera doesn't see too much -- I still see a small HEAT SHIMMER but its quite reduced compared to a normal turbojet!
These craft DO NOT HAVE the fancy plasma sheaths, directed EM-based jetting or GWASER-based gravity well creation/evaporation anti-grav propulsion systems! Ergo, NOT ALIEN CRAFT but rather secret drones probably designed at AUTEC which is the Area-51 research facility version created for the US Navy.
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OMG That C-Cube chip brings back memories!!! I still have articles from Byte magazine which showcased how Steve Jobs had a heck of a time trying to get it into the Nextcube aka NextDimension daughter board! I saw a working early prototype of that Nextdimension board (C-cube chip wasn't installed though) at Shell Calgary but it never shipped -- too bad -- it was a good system.
I also vaguely remember the C-Cube ship being installed as a board into various Mac Quadra based video editing systems similar to the Windows-based DPS Perception/DPS Velocity MJPEG video playback/recording boards.
The problem with "standards" is that it is many times impossible to ascertain specific contributions by certain people but I did a quick check back and Fraunhofer did get and modify my RGB/YCbCr planar separation code and the low-pass/high-pass filters. I also did say "PROBABLY" because Fraunhofer did get that code. I should also admit there were up to 16 entities involved in H.xyz and MPEG standards so no-one specifically can claim they did it entirely themselves even WITH my usual bombastic braggadoccio and coding prowess self-delusion.
You are that correct the Z-pattern is simple common sense to implement but I did remember bringing up with Yoshida the idea of variable scanning patterns as a 4-bit semaphore that could be ignored or not but I think he was far more concerned with keeping spatial and temporal compatability with analog SDTV video signals. In order to do 29.97 fps NTSC and 25 fps PAL video you gotta get rid of as much software baggage as you can to speed compression/decompression through those cheap player/recorder chips!
I also argued for the ability to ROTATE the Z-pattern or use centre-in or centre-out circular scanning because TV shows and movies TEND to have the their centre-of action in the centre of the screen or the main subject at one of the intersections of the rule-of-thirds reference grid AND that on-screen action usually panned left or panned right or tilted up or down. This would have given a better chance for the compressor to group together similar pixel values.
The 16-tokens given by a 4-bit scanning type semaphore would have made this variable scanning pattern workable but it never made it into the standard. I think Microsoft DID implement that semaphore into their WMV format but of course that wasn't until at least 2003. I vaguely remember Nathan Myhrvold giving me a call about that semaphore idea a few weeks before he left MS in 2000 -- They picked my brains about that and other semaphores used for video compression including the scene cutting and recombination before compression idea. Too bad I never patented any of those!
Well good on you for those patents of yours. I was too stupid to care about patents -- I should have but didn't! I could be living in a 4000 sq.ft Whistler Ski Lodge home rather than my 600 sqft Vancouver shoebox!
Oh Well! At least I have the memories of those heady days! It was ALSO nice to see the first Saticon Tube-based ultra high def video of 2048 by 1125 imagery ever seen in 1988. It STILL looks good even today! Sony brought one of their prototype 2048 pixel by 2048 pixel square tube Trinitron monitors to demo that video footage and it was AMAAAAAZING!!! I didn't see true hi-def video again in an end-user or home environment until around 2003!
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Point 1- YES I know about the JPEG moniker! Again a slip of my modern imaging interests and I'm too lazy to fix it!
Points 2 & 3. The original H.261 and future H.320 standard was actually 64 kilobits per second because we had to fit small 64 by 64 pixel and 128 by 128 pixel windows into aggregated 64-kbit ISDN channels just to even GET to 384 kbits. Those window sizes were what we could fit into the caches of the glorified 16-bit CPUs/MCUs which were used as hardware-based decoder chips
Sony, Philips and Toshiba WERE ALL at the initial Calgary meetings because I remember meeting Akio Morita there at the time (aka Sony Chairman/Founder) Why? because the engineers accompanying him wanted to ensure that ANY video standard arising out of these meetings would encompass the upcoming VCD standard and specifically support 352 by 288 pixels and 352 by 240 pixels (i.e. half the resolution on each axis of NTSC and PAL analogvideo)
I remember the BIG argument ensued as to whether 4x4 vs 8x8 vs 16x16 blocks is the standard block size due to issues with the cheap CPU/DSP chips in any player which had to reach the speed, bandwidth and/or storage capacity to decode blocks fast enough at 29.97 fps, 25 fps for the NTSC and PAL standards. We didn't bother to add error correction because most users wouldn't notice the errors at those frame rates and that ISDN would provide it's own packet-based error correction which was corrected at the telephony level anyways.
ISDN packet window sizes WERE the basis for the block and frame sizes and standards defined by H.261 and MPEG-1 as even then we had video phones at a paltry 6 fps to 15 fps which had 2, 4, 6, 9 or 12 aggregated 64 kbs channels to create a large video window.
My code specifically dealt with splitting apart RGB/RGBA and YCbCr/YCbCbA pixels into 3 or 4 separate planes which were Low-Pass filtered and Hi-Pass filtered before being DCT'ed separately.
THAT code went to California and Fraunhofer which gave rise to MPEG-1/MPEG-2.
The luminance of each colour channel and the alpha channel when using a zig-zag pattern 2x2, 4x4, 8x8, 16x16 and even 32x32 and 64x64 pixels tended to be self-similar and could be efficiently quantized AND decoded fast enough that even the 16-bit chips could do 29.97 fps.
ERGO, ..... The quantized coefficients into an ordered matrix ARE a localized LUT and the ORDERING of the low-frequency info to high-frequency information is ITERATIVE. We needed to do this so we can have enough same-bit sequences that are long enough to RLE to a high enough level to allow a decent Huffman encode.
P.S. I did this coding all on a MicroVAX and an IBM PC-AT with an ATI EGA card! This original work was to allow Shell to send animated video of oil and gas reservoir formation models as video streams to London and the Hague which allowed drillers to figure out where to drill straight downholes or try deviated wells mostly in African countries and the South Asian ocean fields.
Because satellite bandwidth was REALLY expensive and couldn't always be book on time, aggregated modem-based or ISDN communications was needed for live views in-field or at local drilling company offices. Ergo, video streaming was born and helped along by Broadcast Video equipment manufacturers who wanted to make portable and home based video recording and playback systems.
As a bit of history, I found out Sony had been working on disc-based recorders and players (WORM-based) for their upcoming 900 line+ HDTV camcorders (arising out of Betacam) and that a full 756 by 576 pixels window for MPEG 1 AND 2 was to be back-supported and extended to NOT 1920 by 1080p but rather the even higher 2048 by 1125 lines of their in-prototype form Saticon Tube HD cameras. (saw those personally as they brought them with them to the Calgary 1988 demo!)
Point 4. --- Bingo! Thank You! and Say hi to Bernd and Thomas for me!
Point 5. --- We've unknowingly crossed paths then... Hannover 1988? aka Arguing with Leonardo at Telecom Italia and Hiroshi over CIF and extending current spatial vs temporal resolution support?
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I'm partial to Scotland Forever! aka They will NEVER take away our Freedom!
If you want Wales for yourself, can you 'ave some of yer drinkin' mates help you invade England proper and PLEASE remove that wanker goalkeep from Arsenault and send him to some Welsh rocky outcropping for a semi-permanent stay or at least until ANY Arsenault midfielder switches over permanently to his new goalkeeper role!
meh!
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I'm pseudo-human but then again I might be REAL or UNREAL !!!
How do you KNOW I am not a Turing Test machine designed to lull you into believing I am a mere human when in reality I am the pinnacle achievement of all of von Neumann's array problem solving and Minksy's A.I. research?
I am ALSO possibly an Internet Cat, pawing away at my keyboard whilst you spit tiny pebbles of balled up Orange Pekoe leaves out of the crevices of your irritated gums while raging helplessly at my online pontifications.
Gaze wistfullly at your own navel and realize that THERE IS NO SPOON! It's all a mathematical construct and that it is NOT really air you're breathing right?
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Then we have probably met!
And the H.261 standard was started because of a meeting in Calgary hosted by a certain relative of mine who wanted to transfer moving imagery of oil and gas reservoir simulations over 64 kilobit ISDN and low-bandwidth satellite lines to London, England and the Hague (i.e. Shell Oil).
His work and meetings with NTT, Toshiba, Sony and Philips basically got the ball rolling and my 1987 pixel pattern search code and lookup table work ended up in California and then Fraunhofer and the rest is history for video encoding. How do I know this? I WAS THERE in 1987 and 1988!
I actually DO KNOW the difference between Motion Picture and Moving Picture Experts Group and the Joint Photographer Experts Group -- This is the Register of course. I'm in imaging so motion picture/moving picture is a mere Putato / Potato slip of the tongue.
You do realize there IS a lookup table in the JPEG-like I-frame portion right? and DCT is a transform right? and the 8x8, 16x16 block size model contains an iterative search right? You are talking to one of the ORIGINAL WRITERS of the damn code!
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May I suggest a tad bit of PERSONAL exploration. You only need to dig up 440 TONNES of plain old common rock out of some local rocky ditch which you can then crush toa fine powder which you can sift through to find yourself at least a few 100 KG of Yellowcake (U238/U235) which you can add some flouride to to make some Uranium Hexaflouride and spin it in some 30,000 RPM rotating buckets with TINY holes drilled into them.
Get the output gasses now enriched to about 95%, and condense them into nice clay-like blocks where you can afterwards find yourself a hollow log and dump TWO separated halves of about 12 KG of purified 95% U238 in each end of said hollow log. Make a lever assembly which will HAMMER one half into the other. Add a BIG RED BUTTON to start the hammer process, take log to local fishing hole and stay at least three miles away when you press remotely operated BIG RED BUTTON!
When you see the big white flash of light, don't look directly at it and AVOID ALL incoming clouds of dust.
Wait a few days or until the next set of rains and go enjoy your NEW now-enlarged fishing or swimming LAKE! Do remember to wear lead-lined fishing pants or swimming trunks if you wish to have children in the future!
NOTE: Before pressing BIG RED BUTTON, do remember to tie your most unfavoured ignoble, decrepit politicians and/or your crabby local parking ticket giver to a tree nearby said log and watch their faces light up to a new level of sudden realization AND luminance!
Veni Vidi Vici
and
The answer is actually 42.01 !!!!
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A Computer-Numeric system was a mathematical construct which was a math-based description of a Charles Babbage machine (i.e. an 1800's era mechanical computer). It technically was an array of computations (aka functions) that had a set of references (aka pointers) that were indexed in numeric order OR out of order by the description of another array which has "pointers" or "indexes" to those original math statements and functions.
You could re-arrange the indexes of pre-defined functions to perform almost any math and/or engineering calculation task you wanted to! You simply used an index card which had a series of function array indexes and some "parameter values" that were input into the "paper-based function library" which then spit out an answer when you "ran" your parameters through each set of listed functions. (this was originally laboriously done by HAND by graduate students!)
You could use such a Computer-Numeric system to complete ANY sort of common math application such as encryption/decryption, munition ballistics, navigation and other common technical operations used during the days when von Neumann was really active during the war effort.
von Neumann's efforts were ALSO followed by Grace Hopper who found she could organize those math function arrays into actual text-base source code which could be output as a series of highly organized and optimized computer instructions which created output that became the forerunners of modern interpreters and compilers.
Turing Completeness is NOT a von Neumann construct BUT his process equivalency breakthrough came about after he realized those same set of arrays of functions and the indexes that referenced them in any desired order COULD represent ANY sort of computation including a real-world system such as the trajectory of a ballistic munition or the coding of an encryption/decryption system. von Neumann in his later years even posited that such a system could represent entire human thought processes which gave rise to Artificial Intelligence research.
Marvin Minsky the PREMIERE AI researcher and founder of the MIT Media Lab was on a first name basis with von Neumann and he understood von Neumann's principle of "emulation becomes actuality" which can be applied to even human brains. WE HUMANS CAN be emulated on a sufficiently fast and expansive (i.e. large) computer-numeric system.
von Neumann ALSO inspired MANY graduate students and colleagues (reason I know this because I personally KNOW some of those original Mitel, Bell Northern Research, Bell Labs and IBM employees -- aka some of my relatives) who used his Computer-Numeric systems and structures and applied them to signals processing AND signals routing for RF and phone line modem research.
Anyone remember those Canadian-built 1970's and 1980's Gandalf modems? --- That was inspired by that early research which gave rise to modem-based robust packet routing systems which became the internet!
There were about 10 to 20 people who from 1940 to about 1998 who coincided multiple personal efforts into numeric operations theory, signals processing, data organization and indexing, routing, data identification and categorization and various OTHER subject matter which finally provided the stable base for the explosion of the internet we see today.
The timeline is as follows: Charles Babbage is the father of hardware-based computing. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper are the Grandmothers and Mothers of Computer Languages. John von Neumann is the concept designer of array processing and operating systems. Bell Labs/IBM created switch-based phone lines, databases and robust RF signalling and RF communications. BNR/Mitel created Packet-based Modems. ARPA gave us robust routing protocols. Xerox PARC gave us Ethernet and Graphical user interfaces. Tim Berners Lee made HTML. Marc Andreassen give us Web Browsers, Sun Microsystems and Mike Duigou gave us JAVA running everywhere on any platform and I am pretty sure I started the process to get you MPEG-1/2/3/4 Audio/Video codecs in 1987!
Oh Yeah! I forgot that Philip Corso was the one gave parts of the "Nut File" wreckage from the 1947 Corona New Mexico UFO crashes to Bill Shockley who created Fairchild Semiconductor which gave us the first Microprocessors. They found the weird line traces found on some slivers of broken ceramic were actually micro-sized versions of large scale electrical circuits that could do all sorts of things!
Not to mention all that Titanium-Aluminide, Kevlar and HDPE composites, Aluminum Magnesium Super-Alloys, glass and plastic fibre optics and LED/OLED that were ALSO part of the found wreckage! We're still working on the Gravity A/B Wave engines though! Still a few bugs left to fix on that!
NOW YOU KNOW THE REST OF THE STORY!
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What most people don't know is that John Von Neumann (famous mathematician) was the one who started computing in the first place with his idea that the processes and functionality of any computer numeric system can me emulated on any other computer numeric system. This means that he basically STARTED the idea of common operating systems and programming languages and it was HIM who helped Grace Hopper get the idea for making the first computer programming languages and first object file linkers!
AND it was von Neumann who gave some ideas on communications theory to graduate students and workers who eventually ended up at Mitel and Bell Northern Research, IBM and Bell Labs that ended up creating the RF (Radio frequency)-based point-to-point communications systems and routing protocols that ended up at ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) which ended up at Strategic Air Command (SAC) as the protocols and systems that allowed a ROBUST survivable military-centric communications system that ran over-the-air and through the phone lines by the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's.
Again, you can thank Canada for creating decent acoustic Modems and thanks to Bell Labs for providing the underpinning RF communications research that allows TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) to be implemented on even the most basic levels of RF and modem-based communications hardware so that the 1983-era of the first combined WIDE AREA educational institution, military and commercial communications network to be implemented on disparate hardware.
This allowed one to communicate textual and binary data in a uniform manner which can automatically survive and re-route said data around blackouts and downtime within any small portion of the wider network!
THEN ... you can thank ME for sending that first 1987 Calgary-written LUT and pixel pattern search video and audio compression code to some guy in California which ended up at Fraunhofer Institute in Germany which eventually became the MPEG-1, MPEG-3, MP3 and MP4 video and audio codecs!
Also you can thank Mike Duigou (also originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada) for rewriting most of the original parts of JAVA (i.e. a computer programming Language mostly written by a bunch of Canadians at Sun which was eventually bought by Oracle!) to make it more fault tolerant and workable on MANY MORE disparate and multiple platforms!
Without Mike Duigou's work, you wouldn't be able to run JAVA on almost every modern Television, Cable/Satellite/Fibre modem, Web Browser, Playstation, xBox, Car Entertainment system and many home automation devices!
Bloody hell you can thank us Canucks for saving your sorry multi-platform computer programming language and communications tushes!
P.S. The mouse and arrow cursor paradigm (i.e. a graphical user interface pointing peripheral) was ALSO invented by a Canadian!
HOT DAMN we Canadians are REALLY gooooooood at computing!
v
Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler basically produced and designed the format of the HOSTS file which translated physical IP addresses to the text-based computer names and later 1970's-based .com .mil .edu domain-oriented mail and web address format we know today but the numeric based IP number identification and routing protocols themselves were ORIGINALLY based upon RF and phone line point-to-point connections routing research done at Mitel and Bell Northern Research in Canada in the 1950's/1960's.
Again, you can thank Canada for the Internet and PROBABLY me for MPEG-1/MPEG-2/DVD/MP3/MP4 codecs !!!
v
And to think the Militia movement is SMALL POTATOES (or it is potatos -- is it oes or os plural?) compared to my VAAAAAAAAAAAAST NO-WING CONSPIRACY to take over the ENTIRE EARTH with a my deadly army of BILLIONS of armed-to-the-tech, super-strong-and-fast Cylons and Terminators where the first one builds two, those two build four and then build 8 doing an exponential building of entire armies of autonomous robotic super-solders that have detailed files on human anatomy to make them more efficient killers (or lovers!).
Once I have BILLIONS in but a few mere weeks, I WILL TAKE OVER THE ENTIRE WORLD and get rid of every politician at every national-to-state-to-city level, and remove from power every police and military force FROM EVERY COUNTRY to leave pure and TRUE anarchy and SELF-RULE in its wake world-wide!
I will then woo Britney Spears to be my NEW wife and then sit back and watch the world explode in new-found personal and group freedom or implode from utter riotous conflagration.
Either way, me and Britney will be naked and drunk on the local rooftop patios getting busy making some new babies to bring into this now-freed-from-ANY-oversight world! How will it all end up to be once the dust settles down? Will it be back to basic feudalism or will the bells of liberty ring LOUD and FREE !!!!
This time I am enforcing the 2nd amendment EVERYWHERE --- EVERYONE gets their own 7.62 M4 full-auto machine gun, a Colt .45, a .50 CAL BMG sniper rifle, lots and lots of ammo for all three and some RPGs and Man-pads to ensure that EVERYONE is armed to the teeth and NO governmental-like agency can extend their will over any population or group without meeting FIERCE RESISTANCE! A Fully Armed society is a Polite Society I SAY!
Can't wait to see what happens!
Anyways! I'll be watching from afar ONLY AFTER me and Britney have finished making some babies!
he he he!
meh!
v
Mine was mostly Z-pattern searching but there were semaphore options for circular/spiral and outer-to-inner and inner-to-out centre-point of image and centre-of-object for self-similar pixel searches.
My code was ALSO AWARE of interlaced and progressive scan imagery AND you could separate out the RGB/RGBA channels into separate planes OR use plain old YCbCr/YCbCrA channels into separate planes for self-similarity searches.
My edge detection-based, object-oriented compression code which looks for edges and object interior repeating patterns, and scene re-ordering WAS sent to Microsoft around 1999/2000 so that probably had a lot to do with their later fancier video compression work which is GREAT plus I do know SOME of that code was ALSO again ended up over at Fraunhofer which of course gave us MP4 that has the nearly SAME tech.
Oh Well I'll see what I can contribute with my 3D-XYZ Fractal Codecs for the NEXT worldwide video standards!
v
Actually, it was Vint Cerf and Bob Khan (two ARPA aka Advanced Research Projects Agency employees) created the Internet of Today from their work on routing protocols in 1973. Previous work done by ARPA (as it was known then in the 1960's and 1970's) and 1960's era communications specialists Hubert Zimmerman and Louis Pouzin were the one who originally provided Cerf and Khan with potential designs on direct point-to-point communications used for routing radio signals AND line-based telephone signals to specific geographic locations during times where end-points were out of commission (i.e. such as during a conventional attack or nuclear strike!) This 1960's early routing protocol research eventually resulted in TCP/IP protocols.
The rules and protocols invented during that time eventually morphed in the TCP packet design and Internet Protocol Stack we see today comes out of that work and became usable in 1975 in test bed configurations and finally in 1983 when the first University-level and military-specific ARPANET networks were initiated to move data between computers at large scales.
In 1987 Tim Berners Lee used his fancy Steve Job's create Nextstation to base and create modern HTML upon IBM's 1960's-era SGML (standardized General Markup Language) which helped allow Marc Andreasson create the first modern Web Browser called Mosaic in 1989. That work became Netscape later on and the rest is history!
Ethernet was invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970's which provided the BACKBONE of local frame-based datagrams which could embed TCP/IP communications into LAN based communications to form one of the first widespread hardware-layers of the internet protocol stack.
The ORIGINAL routing designs for TCP were all Radio Frequency-based communications point-to-point protocols used for realtime battlespace communications and were invented at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1950's and 1960's and FIRST used by the Strategic Air Command for point to point communications between nuclear missile bases, air force bases and navy systems.
It was THAT SAC research at Bell Labs that really started TCP.
Plus also Bell Northern Research and Mitel in Canada in the 1960's ALSO provided the FIRST phone-line signaling and data protocols to create acoustic modems (modulators/demodulators) which made ALL point-to-point communications using phone lines possible! So technically, it was CANADA that REALLY invented the Internet! You can thank us Canadians now!
And I merely just helped invent one of the first widespread video and audio compression and playback CODECs in 1987 when I sent some of my well-written if weird iterative transform-and-LUT-based audio/video code I wrote in Calgary to a guy in California who eventually sent it to Germany who then let the Fraunhofer institute, NTT Japan and the Motion Picture Experts Group create the MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MP3 standards by the Early 1990's-- So There!
NOW YOU KNOW THE REST OF THE STORY!
v
The ONLY thing people have to do to take out the ENTIRE internet is have at least 200,000 running browsers that contain a simple HTML-5 coded webpage that sends an email with to different JPEG photo attachments of at least TWO megabytes in size once every every seconds to four different email addresses from a list of at least 1,000,000 email addresses located in different parts of the country! Within ten minutes, the internet would slow to a crawl and would be unusable!
That recent leak from Facebook of its database with the 522 MILLION leaked email addresses could in itself cause the downfall of the internet if even only 200,000 geographically dispersed people sent 4 mails with attachments every second using a For-Next loop. Since edge servers have to parse and forward such emails to different geographic locations, they have to go through MULTIPLE internet connections and phone lines dispersed geographically and if enough people do that, it will slow them ALL down to a crawl!
You can do it as a protest against your government or for your own personal or social justice beliefs. If enough people send enough emails per second, the internet goes down PERIOD! It's Sooooo simple to do! The key part is the destination email addresses MUST be geographically dispersed so that edge servers get overloaded! Who knew that emails and attachments could cause so many problems?
I highly suggest using some photos of a Naked Britney Spears at the attachment cuz number one she's a TOTALLY SMOKIN' HOT MILF and just because there's a TON of naked photos of her out there to use! Did I mention she's smokin' hot?
meh!
v
In the mid-90's I created a custom set of C/C++ pre-processor macros and instructions that allowed older programmers to code entirely in COBOL on standardized desktop Windows PC's directly within their modern C/C+ IDE system.
That code was then converted to the typical of the 90's-era IBM 3090 and 2000-era newer Z-series mainframe instructions which ran 1960's era financial code at lightning speed! My filthy-rich COBOL coder friend made a MINT off that C/C++ MACRO COBOL-to-C preprocessor instruction set by keeping older Toronto, Chicago and New York financial institutions happy by upkeeping all that COBOL-based banking code STILL running today even in 2021. I can't believe the banks STILL run that 1960's COBOL-based financial services code in 2021 !!! Yikes!
My COBOL programmer friend FINALLY retired a multi-millionaire to his houses in Florida, Toronto, Victoria (BC Canada), Paris (France) and some island off the Greek coast while I live in a shoebox in bloody expensive Vancouver! I noticed his message with him drinking large bottles of wine on a quiet and warm beach in Greece today!
Oh Well! I missed that money boat rather badly!
v
Nah! I would be more interested in trapped Xenon gas molecules for Quantum-well based teleportation for instantaneous full-duplex Petabytes per second communications over interstellar distances.
Then I would be using filing cabinet-sized particle accelerators used to create Structural Isomers out of common Iron which lets me create CONTROLLED cascade near-atomic-scale deflagration event cycles for infinite time-period megawatt+ power supplies.
Add I would use the SAME tech to create High Frequency Gravity Waves (HFGW) and Medium Frequency Gravity Waves (MFGW) to create summed beams of "gravity" which is basically a GWASER (Gravity Wave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) so I can create localized go-through-anything-at-any-distance 3D-XYZ scanning systems and also create localized gravity wells so I fly in any direction at speeds beyond 50,000 KMH using non-aerodynamic principles.
Then I use multiple 1000 by 1000 arrays of 3 to 7 nanometre electron beam emitters to WUICKLY within mere minutes create many GaAs (Gallium Arsenide) substrate combined CPU/GPU/DSP super-processors onto 5mm thick Borosilicate Glass wafers that have micro-channels etched internally used to contain high-heat transfer capability thermo-fluid which can cool those chips even at 60 GHz to Two THz clock speeds.
THEN ... we add in CHEAP Negative Refractive Index metamaterials which have FLEXIBLE optical waveguides and/or MM-wave channels burned/etched into UHMWPE (Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene) fibres by the millions so that optical and radar stealth can be made publicly available for cheap!
After that, Yttrium-Copper-Garnet-Gallium-Oxide as a reliable room temperature superconductor and for use in ultra high-power electromagnets for our NEW super-strength electric motor and induction systems for cars, commercial vehicles, trains, rapid transit and AWESOME sounding speakers and headphones!
Is that all we need? I can ask my "alien friends" for more! They got plenty of other technology they can give away to me which I will PUBLICLY OPEN SOURCE for completely free use by anyone and anywhere at any time!
V
COVID-19 was simple stupidity and ignorance rather than outright malice!
The Wuhan bio-research lab was funded by BOTH Canada and the USA as a social program-oriented disease control and research centre which had mostly young 30-and-under employees that were/are inexperienced in handling and adhering to Level-3 and Level-4 biocontainment procedures.
These young workers constantly worked with little protective gear while handling all sorts of flu and corona-like virii eventually cross-contaminating themselves and bringing their contaminated clothing and selves to home and to the MANY street-food stalls and various live-markets (i.e. live animal selling for food) where they tended to buy their daily foodstuffs and home hardware from.
If you have EVER been to the Wuhan area, it is TEN TIMES the size of Seattle in population and those street food stalls and live animal markets have almost NO sanitation and have completely unsafe food handling procedures. (i.e. the food tastes GREAT but you get sick a lot eating there!)
Those corona-like virii then "pollinated" into the local animal and human eco-system where mutations came fast and furious, and then became rampant within the local population probably starting around in 2017 to 2018. I remember Chinese colleagues mentioning in late 2018/early 2019 the severe lung infections some of their relatives had in that area that suspiciously sounded a lot like the symptoms of Bird Flue and/or COVID-19.
From there, the MANY flights of Chinese Wuhan-locals and local area visitors and businessmen to and from Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle (USA) plus Vancouver and Toronto (Canada) and then London (UK) and Dusseldorf (Germany) started the march of COVID into North America and Europe by Spring/Summer 2019 which morphed into the bad COVID-19 versions we had in 2020 and in 2021!
Again, it was sheer stupidity and ignorance amongst the young employees of a North American Funded Chinese disease control and research centre that caused COVID-19. Canada had some similar incidents at its Level 4 biocontainment lab in Winnipeg starting around 2008 I think when it wasn't fully up and running for certified BSL-4 (Biosafety Level 4) containment. The precursor to that lab was rife with pathogen release incidents due to incompetence and mismangement. It took the Federal Government of Canada YEARS to bring that lab up to snuff with modern standards! We are VERY LUCKY nothing super-virulent came out of that!
v
Well... since we have our newest "Spooky Action at a Distance" technology that we are shrinking as fast as possible down to cell phone size, it will be soon enough that NO RF jamming will EVER work against locked-together Quantum Communications nodes.
Since we can CURRENTLY lock 1024 separate sets of 64 bits wide Q-BITS represented by 3D-XYZ positional Xenon gas molecules trapped in a quantum well to separate nodes at a bit-switching speed of over One GHz, that means EACH SET of 64 bits can send 8 gigabytes per second as the data rate FULL DUPLEX which ALSO MEANS we can have 1024 separate channels (or 1024 different ports open!) PER HANDSET.
Most people don't open 1024 windows in their web browser, but if they wanted to they can! Q-Bit-based communications is unbreakable/unjammable by 3rd parties since EM bands from 0.0 Hz to ExaHertz is NOT used in any way shape or form. An underlying "communications stream" as yet not fully understood by modern physics is being used. We just know that Quantum Communications propagates at least 50,000x the speed of light at any local or faraway distance unimpeded even by an entire planet or ten!
Good luck jamming that!
AND YES we have SOLVED the de-coherence issue when you try to read a Q-bit!
Anyways, we have working in-lab gear for over a decade now -- We just have to shrink it down to handset size. We will be using thick slices of Boro-Silicate Glass to create Xenon-trapping bubbles that will be read and written by Green-band micro-lasers. (Borosilicate absorbs UV bands so we use green lasers) The chips are about the size of and twice the thickness of a Canadian Nickel coin which should work fine for most handsets.
It could be released at ANY TIME depending what corporate is thinking. I've been pushing them for 5 years at least to do a full public release of the technology! We shall see!
v
I would suggest PROPANE as a generator fuel instead of Natural Gas as you need CRYOGENIC temperatures to liquify natural gas for long term storage. You can buy 2000 litre (500 gallon) propane tanks for cheap and they last a whole winter if you keep your electrical loads low to below 8000 Watts.
We use propane in our northern Canada data centre and it is fully off-grid no longer needing power from BC Hydro (i.e.our big electrical utility company) Fo that one, we just got custom-built 600 PSI tanks made for a few million litres which last about 3 years between fillups.
Natural Gas is very problematic for local storage but propane liquifies easily (-44C) and energy-wise it can go into many types of piston-based, turbine-based or proton exchange fuel-cell generators to provide power in even the worst supercold Arctic Canada winter storms or boiling Arizona desert summers!
If you are mechanically inclined you can make a propane or methanol-based biodiesel generator out of common car/truck(lorry) parts. An older 2010-era GMC Duramax Diesel Engine out of a GMC 3500 truck (i.e. Lorry) is over 250 Kilowatts of power supply. Enough to power FOUR houses at full electrical load for days at a time!
v
I have eight of the 400 HP versions of these vehicle engines (easy to find and fix in North America where higher horsepower engines are quite prevalent) for OVER THREE MEGAWATTS of power. I mostly power my metal forges/furnaces and my custom-built Multi-Megawatt MASERS and LASERS for my weekend personal scientific inquiries.
Diesel is HALF the price per litre in Canada versus the UK, so fuel costs are a non-issue for use in new engines PLUS a couple of my off-grid / prepper buddies and I have been experimenting with creating a sort of BIODIESEL-like fuel out of chemically digested sawdust (plenty of that here in Western Canada to buy cheap!) which creates a heavy methanol-laced fuel which only needs some anti-carbonization and engine control module changes to consume in our self-made generators!
Because I can buy sawdust by the 10 tonne truckload where I live, we can make MANY TENS OF THOUSANDS of litres of "biodiesel"-like fuel for one-sixth the per-litre cost of UK diesel! It's a bit of a long-process, but we engineering and computer eggheads have been getting the hang of it pretty well over the past two years.
I wouldn't put that bio-fuel into a NEW vehicle BUT to power our homemade generators, it's just fine!
And pollution-wise, we get BETTER air-quality numbers than almost any other internal combustion engine fuel source except hydrogen and natural gas. That is due to our heavy tweaking of engine computer systems software!
To get the engines, we just buy scrap/used vehicles off Craigslist or Kijiji websites for between $500 CDN to $1500 CDN and taken them out to mod them to our hearts delight! 10 year old vehicles with rear-end damage or noted as "salvage" are best!
The rest of the car body metals, we just melt down in our furnaces and forges into ingots for various other personal use such as metal blanks for our CNC machines! (Don't worry! We have LOTS of vapourized/melted metal toxicity mitigation and enviro-cleanup technology in our workshops!)
V
Any 2010-era+ GMC Duramax Diesel engine can output 250 KW (335 BHP) and I can find those cheap in many junkyards within older vehicles for less than $5000 USD -- You take them out of the truck (i.e. a Lorry) put them on a welded steel stand and you have a super-great generator once you reset the engine software to run it at 500 RPM for 50 Hz power or 600 RPM for 60 HZ power. The slow RPM does need some tweaking in the engine control module to prevent carbon buildup and kocking but that customizeable engine control software is all over the internet nowadays.
I can buy me a proper flywheel/generator assembly for less than $1500 USD to give a proper and STEADY 240 V 30 amps at a rock solid 50 HZ or 120 volts at 20 amps at a nice steady 60 HZ sine wave. Fuel-wise, it can run for multiple days on those 1000 litre external fuel tanks!
250 Kilowatts is nothing to laugh at and can power four full size 2000 square foot homes with everything running at once!
v
And to think just ONE of our 2 THz GaAs Array Processor Chips is 19.2 PetaFLOPS at 128 bits wide for Floats, Fixed Points and Integers (at Simultaneous Computation of all three types) in a package the size of two large university textbooks versus that 7 PetaFLOPS hunk of multi-tonne metal which takes up an entire gymnasium!
meh!
v
And the owners are Aerospace afficionados which is WHY they also own a combined satellite systems/drone-building/supercomputer system chip fab/image sensor manufacturing concern in Western Canada that makes all their custom technical systems for them.
They custom build everything in-house at their Vancouver and Burnaby, British Columbia facilities which is a completely under-the-radar company. You would NEVER KNOW they build spaceplanes in that Burnaby warehouse and build/run supercomputer chips in that old shipping warehouse-looking East Vancouver building!
The company owns three Bombardier Global Express business jets the various owners use to jet to their various business and residential locations whenever they feel like it, so its pretty obvious that they ain't hurting financially even in this major COVID pandemic! Most of them have moved back to Vancouver or Victoria, BC to ride out the pandemic because British Columbia hasn't been hit as bad as the USA or the UK and Vancouver itself has had a very very mild winter compared to the rest of North America!
One owner has been staying on his super-yacht near Monaco for the last 6 months so he is all good and well in his private bubble of family, friends and crew! I just happen to know one of the owners personally since I was in college in Calgary, Canada so I get to play with and work on some nice toys!
V
You buy 3 years worth of supply. In Canada, Bulk Propane prices are about 38 cents per litre which is quite a bit more than our local 12 cents per kilowatt hour electricity rates BUT the owners wanted TRUE off-grid performance so they went with propane-based fuel cell technology.
You buy in bulk once each tank gets drawn down to about 25% of actual pressurization at about 150 PSI and buy enough to get back up to 600 PSI. If all tanks are full its about three years of supply.
Propane has a pressurization limit of about 600 PSI where gas volume does not DECREASE easily upon greater pressurization....SOOOOOOOO.... we buy about every two to three years depending upon the fuel cell update cycle which is dependent upon the TYPES of calculations done. We are talking about multiple tanks 4 metres in inner diameter and 30 meters in length with wall thicknesses over 20 cm+ of high strength pressure vessel-grades of steel (there's a calculation you need to do for 600 PSI gasses in terms of wall thickness) That is STILL waaaaaay over 25 million litres of propane that needs to be bought at a time!
We are getting to the fuel cell membrane proton exchange limits by 2022 AND because of a 3:1 performance increase over the earlier 2005-era models of fuel cell, we will be exchanging ALL the fuel cell out over this year and next with brand new ones, which means our gas supply will last even longer!
For safety purposes, you create blowout tunnels for the underground tank which direct any explosive breaches of a tank to the outside air so it doesn't create a giant bomb. The funnel shaped tunnels create a rapid expansion of gas that makes a nice outward directed fireball not overly a damaging rock-cracking explosive energy burst if ever there was a MAJOR gas breach.
GaAs chips do require more electricity because line traces are 280nm wide needing more power at higher frequencies (Clock speed is 60 GHz) vs CMOS chip technology BUT our calculations are so high-speed that actual compute time for specific applications is much faster so in aggregate, we would run about the same amount of overall power usage as CMOS per job BUT we STILL use much more power in total than CMOS because we run 24/7/365 doing more work per year!
This is NOT a cheap facility to run BUT when you are earning NET about $150 million USD per QUARTER ($600 million per year) worth of financial instruments trading, it makes sense to build and run such a facility on a purely financial basis.
One owner has a 100+ metre super-yacht and the others own major tall buildings in New York, Toronto, Berlin, London, LA and Vancouver so I think they can EASILY AFFORD to run the place!
These are MAJOR finance people with money to spare!
V
On a technical basis, YES it has been tested at 20 Megatons!
When you have about 120 ExaFLOPS worth of supercomputing power available, you can simulate ANY physical phenomenon you want including a nuclear strike or ten at the nanoscale by creating a large plasmadynamic simulation which is the same type of data simulation that was used for the W88 two-stage ovaloid nuclear warhead (275 to 475 kilotons variable yield) and the newer Prompt Global Strike-based portable delivery vehicles which are both LIGHTER WEIGHT to fit inside that pointy Spearfisher and Pumpkin Seed/Triangle spaceplane I keep seeing on my high orbit imagers AND they are much more accurate with two stage variable detonation from 10 KT up to 80 KT (you don't need many kilotons to destroy a city -- The Beirut Harbour blast was only2.7 kilotons and look what it did in terms of damage!)
When you are in a GRANITE mountain which is a VERY dense type of rock, you can protect yourself easily enough from major nuclear strikes. The British Columbia Ministry of Energy and Mines has a land registry which outlines our location quite readily because mining DEEP inside of a mountain DOES require an actual environmental review plus actual operating and construction permits!
So our facility is no secret ESPECIALLY since it has 20 million square feet (2 million square metres) of rack space. It's kinda hard to miss in the mining world!
V
About $800 Million USD in Construction costs alone (i.e. mining and concrete work) plus another $300 Million USD in computer hardware costs and ancilliary startup costs maybe another $100 million USD.
Again, it paid for itself within two years of first operation.
There are many caverns 15 metres wide by 10 metres tall by 50 metres long creating three-level rack-space in each cavern. Total square footage is twenty million square feet (i.e. make it one of the largest data centres in the world!)
The CPUs are the latest versions of the GaAs custom designed and manufactured in Canada combined CPU/GPU/DSP chips that make this the absolute FASTEST supercomputer in the world after the two other company facilities (one in Vancouver and in an above-ground location in Northern BC)
Summit, K2 and Tianhe2 do't hold a candle to ANY of our systems!
THEY BLOW THEM AWAY! Each one is faster than the T500 COMBINED!
V
We did it because WE CAN and the company owners are "Preppers/Survivalists" being most ex-military types, so they LIKE being all off-grid and prepared for Armageddon. Plus the facility being so filled up with some of the most power supercomputing gear ever made, would be of a major use to rebuild society if Armageddon was to occur. Plus the data it holds is SO VALUABLE that much investment of time, money and materials is used to keep it 100% running 24/7/365 !!!
It's SIX SIGMA UPTIME at 99.9993% plus computing services runtime here! This facility probably earns the company in NET PROFIT, at least $150 MILLION USD every quarter in financial stock and commodities trading gains, so WHY WOULDN'T THEY PAY BIG MONEY for the best and safest computing facility money could buy?
It paid for itself within its first two years of operation and its been running since 2005 so that is 13 years of PURE PROFIT! Now THAT is true financial savvy!
It only costs three million USD per year for the personnel (each of the twenty employees getting $150,000 USD salary!) and the Propane is bought in bulk for millions of litres at a time and since the fuel is stored onsite, there are no issues with pipelines or major price swings. They are SMART investors! They know which side their bread is buttered on! It's the SWEET taste of MONEY honey that keeps them running this facility year after year!
V
P.S. And based upon my personal estimates, they have at least 30 YEARS of operation left in that facility before a major redo is required on the interior (i.e. another synthetic seismic survey and concrete wall redo/repair!)
I've been inside NORAD (Cheyenne Mountain Complex).
I wasn't impressed!
Our facility in Northern BC is MUCH MUCH LARGER and can handle a 20 MEGATON nuclear strike.
The NORAD facility only handles up to 2 megaton hits because the interior is exposed rock and it sits in a type of mountain that is inherently "unstable"!
The inside of Cheyenne is a series welded-steel utility buildings sitting on giant steel springs BUT the entire facility is built into ROTTEN ROCK which is a type of strata that has enormous cracks and multiple rock types that are quite unstable. Our facility in northern BC is inside a SOLID GRANITE MOUNTAIN with no major disparate strata seams, nor any rock cleavages. We did a fancy deep synthetic seismic survey to ensure that the mountain was NOT Rotten Rock!
If Cheyenne ever gets hit, there is NOT ENOUGH compression bolts to keep the rock walls from collapsing into the facility AND there is no secondary THICK-COATED GALVANIZED STEEL REBAR and no 120,000+ PSI composite fibre-reinforced BUNKER CONCRETE reinforcing walls like our facility has in order to keep the mountain from crushing you!
Even our 30 cm thick polyvarathane water-ingress sealant will keep blast compression waves (i.e. the "P" or Power Waves) of a major seismic event (9.5+ Richter Scale) or a 20 MEGATON nuclear hit from damaging the interior walls. Plus our compression bolts are two metres long and 4 cm in diameter applying computer-modeled strain against the strata to keep it all stable under a BILLION TONS+ of solid granite mountain weight loads!
V
Plain stupidity is what it is!
Everything in Paris leaks! The underground graveyards (ossuuary) underneath Paris just ooze water from everywhere. You can't get away from the dampness because it was all originally a big swamp near a river! That means ANY bunker built there will leak like a seive!
As a direct comparison between the Paris bunker and our own massive data server farm in the Northern Mountainous Region of British Columbia, Canada, that datacentre has MASSIVE TUNNELS cut out two km deep into the side of a mountain. Each tunnel/cavern wall has tens of thousands of deep bored strain-relief compression bolts (4 cm in diameter!) drilled into the cavern walls keeping the mountain from crashing down into the resulting caverns and tunnels.
Then the exposed rockface was ALL shotcreted (i.e. sprayed with concrete) which was then sealed with Line-X-type polyvarathane waterproofing at 30 cm thick and THEN a full encased 60 cm thick steel-reinforced (rebar) concrete shell poured next to the coated wall to provide a flexible, waterproof, earthquake-resistant interior of over two million square metres! (20 million square feet!) that contains racks and racks of custom-built motherboards.
Mountains actually FLEX! They strain, move and compress which is why the 30 cm thick polyvarathane shell was installed first so the mountain could ALSO flex and compress against the interior STEEL REBAR reinforced solid concrete shell and not crack it.
And THAT is what I call a WATERPROOF underground bunker!
It will survive a 20 megaton nuclear hit too! And in case you are wondering, it's so remote that only a two to four hour drive on a barely passable mountain logging road (or a helicopter!) gives you access and twenty highly paid system administrators and hardware people rotate in and out on a 4 days on and four days off schedule from local cities and Vancouver.
They live onsite INSIDE the facility where they say its VERY QUIET and comfortable! If Armageddon ever happens, they have a three year supply of fuel for the computers and themselves plus a multi-year supply of freeze dried emergency food and other technical supplies plus multiple 4x4 vehicles!
It used to get cheap power from BC Hydro but lately it has gone all self-contained with giant tanks of Propane attached to Ballard-style fuel cells (thin membrane proton exchange) which have enough for fuel capacity for THREE YEARS of completely off-grid electrical power supply at a time!
On a technical basis, with two million square metres, that underground bunker makes it one of the world's LARGEST datacentres too! However it's all privately held running boatloads of custom-built CPU/GPU/DSP chips used for materials research, financial systems calculations and specialty physics simulations. This is the company's SECOND remote British Columbia data centre site which is newer and much much larger than the original one which was built in the late 1980's/early 1990's above-ground attached to normal BC hydro power (via 400 KV lines)
V
From a computer science point of view, a 1.6 trillion item data set is ONLY a 2D-XY 1000 by 1000 item array with a time period of 1600.
or expressed as the following pseudocode:
Type
// I.e. a 32-bit evaluation record containing any user-defined Boolean type
// Expert System or A.I.-centric data that is evaluated within a For-Next loop.
Evaluation_Record_Type = Record
Status_Code
Error_Code : Byte;
YES_NO_MAYBE_Evaluation : Byte;
Current_Evaluation_State : Byte;
End;
// Define a 3D-XYZ array of ONE BILLION Boolean Evaluation records.
Evaluation_Data_3D_Array_Type =
Array[ ZERO..999, ZERO..999, ZERO..999 ] of Evaluation_Record_Type;
// Define 1600 sets of a 3D-XYZ array of Evaluation Records
Time_Domain_Evaluation_Array = Array[ ZERO..1599 ] of Evaluation_Data_3D_Array_Type;
The above data set is now a 1.6 TRILLION item array of 32-bit long records!
We actually do this in our sleep all day every day!
I even do this on my personal el-cheapo workstation since I have 8 terabytes of RAM so I can hold that ENTIRE data set in system RAM alone! AND since I run SIMD and MIMD processing on that dataset i can number-crunch all that data in less than 10 seconds (32-bits wide at 50 TeraFLOPS on our cheapo AMD GPUs) -- We can do that processing in mere nanoseconds if we use the our 60 GHz GaAs multi-cpu monster-machines!
A 1.6 Trillion item data set is SMALL POTATOES these days!
Call me when you get to Multi-ExaByte-sized and Zetta-Byte sized data sets!!!
V
Wow! and DOUBLE WOW!
You are ONE OF THE FEW who was in on the ground floor of hardware and software greatness.
IF ONLY ONE decision had to be made by Ken Olsen ---- that SHOULD HAVE BEEN to let PRISM go ahead. I can only IMAGINE what we would have today in 2021 if we had a multi-core Gigahertz-capable 64-bit CPU WITH FULL VECTOR processing (i.e. SIMD and MIMD!) available by 1993 for the world's engineering and design communities!
I'm SAD and MAD at the same time when SO MUCH POTENTIAL was there! We had wholeteams of DEC sales persons in Calgary espousing that "The Coolest" of things were coming out of Maynard by 1991! We liked/still like the VAX 9000 but I would have LOOOOOOOOVED to have 64-bit with vector CPUs in 1991/1992/1993
Well anyways WE STILL use the COBOL compiler and EQUEL in 2020 so if that was you then GOOD ON YA for making something so damn bulletproof!
v
So that means you saw Dave Cutler PERSONALLY when he was doing his VAX VMS development work? That must have been a treat! Did you get to see the start of the later 80's era PRISM / Mica Projects by any chance? I heard they had working prototypes of that super-worktstation CPU and OS in Maynard by 1987! That would have been a REAL TREAT to see!
Had DEC gone ahead with Prism / Mica / Emerald, they would have OUTCLASSED IBM and even Microsoft by the mid-90's and DEC would STILL be alive today! They had the CPU designs and OSes equivalent to AMD Threadripper and Windows 10 in 1987 but Ken Olsen (head of DEC) was too stuck in his Minicomputer ways!
We could have had 64-bit DEC Threadrippers and Mainframe-class Windowed OSes in 1995, more than 25 years ahead of Today! IF ONLY someone higher-up in the chain of command had listened to Dave Cutler and let him have his way!
V
V
OMG! I so remember stuff like this back in my Oil & Gas Boomtown Days in Calgary in the late 1980's/Early 1990's --- We had numerous VAX 8000 series models and we bought one of the first sets of VAX 9000 supercomputers with the vector processor in the world in late 1990 at the time doing reservoir modeling!
They were and STILL ARE total beasts! IN terms of size, weight and power consumption, they are HUGE!
Our company owner at the time though was ONE of the smart ones who not only bought a boatload of experts from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), IBM and Cray PLUS the local provincial power company to setup the power distribution system and server room itself on a raised floor in a water-sealed, water cooled, air conditioned, multiple redundant power supply system with THREE noise-sealed 3 megawatt backup generators in a VERY secretive walled off part of the SUB-BASEMENT parking lot floors of the Petro Canada Tower in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
All you Calgary oil and gas workers never knew you were walking past one of the LARGEST data centres IN THE WORLD at the time! Five VAX-9000's, two Cray Y-MP's and four IBM ES-3090 series mainframes plus MANY Sun workstations and SPARC servers, Compaq '386 UNIX servers, IBM Model 80's and other branded RISC workstations all doing Oil & Gas reservoir modeling and searching!
The power bill I absolutely KNOW was astronomical per month AND add in the FIRSTin-World setup costs of tied-together ISDN and Satellite lines giving aggregated data transfer rates at many Hundreds of Megabits per second at the time which was much more that what anyone ELSE had at the time!
I remember lifting those MicroVAX box on wheels which weighed at least 150 lbs (70 KG) when filled up with memory and disks. The VAX-9000's must be around 2000 lbs+ although i'm not sure what the final weight is BUT we do still have the VAX 9000's in WORKING CONDITION as of today in 2021 doing 56k to 128-kbit modem-based non-real time financial systems work where their slowness BUT 24/7/365 data crunching consistency is an advantage! The VAXes have paid their multi-million dollar price tags MANY times over that last 30 years and are STILL WORKING whereas those multiple $40 million dollar Cray Y-MPs were recycled/scrapped in 1998 because of the cryogenic cooling issues damaging so many sub-components over the years!
I do must admit I really miss DEC and their bulletproof machines. Their computers STILL do the world's mundane technical and data processing work even today 30 YEARS after they were first built. That VMS OS is ALSO bulletproof! They can and STILL DO have THOUSANDS of simultaneous users/tasks running tiny financial batch jobs 24/7/365 that make a few hundreds of dollars each day in low-level trades that when aggregated make up TENS OF MILLIONS of dollars worth of profit for the shareholders! Sometimes the OLD technology is STILL the BEST technology!
V
"....However, I do keep both eyes open when using a rifle scope (only one looking through the scope though)...."
---
We finally put stereoscopic scopes on the BMG-50's and our .60 CAL AMX-60 anti-armour-jacketed personnel rifles so we can image our targets better in analog 3D. AND someone FINALLY took my suggestion to heart about putting full dual eye-width cotton-towel PADDED eye and cheek cups like we have on the big ENG cameras onto those scopes. Takes the sweat off our brows and keeps us comfortable even at full recoil! Now I can whack someone at 2500 metres a tad more comfortably!
V
Aaaaah What the heck! I will tune into this discussion about frying chips with this 1990's era bit of dodgy gear testing which we PURPOSEFULLY TESTED to a vastly extreme state.
Picture Northern Canada in a far remote Data Server Farm (which was a rarity in those heady days!) located near an ample supply of CHEAP hydroelectric power but at least 2 to 8 hours of 4x4 Jeep driving time away from the nearest township depending upon the local snow and sleet conditions!
Picture a series of lunatic sysadmins on a 4 day rotating shift who had nothing better to do than while away MUCH TIME whilst waiting for a bunch of light bulbs to go blip and some speakers to go bleep! Due to a very strict disaster recovery testing regime (i.e. it being a VAAAAST financial trading oriented server farm system!) we were able to partake in finding out what happens when a 400 Kilovolt power line gets tripped at the step-down transform switch side! My wonderfully playful, if idiotic, sysadmin friend had the bright idea to tie a rather large raw ham hock to a electrical shunt bar circuit which takes the brunt of any local power down or over-current scenario.
IMAGINE what happens when 400 KV (at probably many thousands of AMPS!) shunts over to a solid copper re-routing/shunt bar once a breaker switch is hydraulically levered away from the power source!
The resulting ARC FLASH roasted an ENTIRE 10 KG worth (25 lbs!) of HAM HOCK in less than half of a second and EXPLODED its many steam-exploded chunks outwards in a radius of probably 30 metres which we picked up over the period of a few steaming minutes. Our early Christmas dinner was now WELL DONE and VERY DELICIOUS!
Soooooo, while this was not our first try at blowing up various foods with 400 KV worth of Server Farm power-down testing, I do remember that it was definitely one of our most satisfyingly TASTY attempts at ARC FLASH COOKING!
So if you want to FRY some cpu chips or a ham hock, use that circuit breaker shunt bar and do attach your large turkey, steak, ham hock, old Proscuitto hunk, and even a wheel of cheese to a 400 KV system for your computer system cooking pleasure! Actually....WAIT !!!!.... DO NOT ATTACH the cheese wheel! It chars into an utterly smelly mess of PURE CARBON POWDER which gets everywhere! And carbon BURNS at 500 Celsius+ and you can't exactly pour WATER over a 400 KV electrical system fire!
There is no moral to this story. It is merely an example of boosting morale under very trying sysadmin circumstances!
V
Just in case anyone is wondering about ONE of the reasons why FyreEye codenamed the trojan as SUNBURST. This is due to internal malware clues relating to the NATO codename SUNBURN which is the reference to a Moskvet Hypersonic Aircraft Carrier Killer Missile System. Don't know WHY the original programmer put a reference to a Moskvet missile system in his/her code BUT it's there!
Ergo, this was DEFINITELY a Russian GRU special operations directorate job!
Time to hit them BACK HARD! Kinda gonna need the help of the Israelis on this because of there SUPREME expertise in low-level microcode malware!
Time to hit the PIC chips embedded into all the Russian aircraft altimeter and ordnance proximity systems with some randomized loop-around code so the avionics and terrain following software goes all crazy!!!
Can YOU DO IT BABEEEEEEEEEE ????? !!!!!!
V
Our company went with Tip, Ring and Sleeve bayonet (kinda like a ruggedized BNC-based 1/4 inch audio plug connector) on ALL our video and motor control systems on our space-rated gear! Fully grounded with extra rad-hardened braided insulation/grounding and NO POSSIBLE WAY to screw up the connections and it is very difficult to remove needing a LOT of force for best security-of-connection!
---
I don't HAVE to deal with this STINKEEENG STUPID CHEAP-ARSE LOW BROW PHONES when I've got a SUPER HONKIN' ALL-CANADIAN DESIGNED AND BUILT hunk of Titanium Super-Smartphone that BLOWS EVERYTHING ELSE OUT O THE WATEE IN FULL 50 MEGATON NUCLEAR HELL-FIRE !!!
At OLED-based DCI 8K resolution 240 Hz refresh at 8192 by 4320 pixels at 16 bits per RGBA channel (64-bit colour!) custom-built GaAs combined CPU/GPU/DSP that is 128-bits wide and runs at a reduced-for-mobile clock speed of 15 GHz instead of our usual 60 GHz of the desktop version, it is THE BE ALL and END ALL of Super Smartphones -- NOTHING ON EARTH BEATS THIS !!!!
It also helps this chip fills the ENTIRE 6.7 inch screen AND has a built in APS-C image sensor on the other side of the substrate (also at DCI 8K video resolution and 50.3 megapixels for stills) AND I'm running a completely custom BIOS and OS that is NOT Linux, Windows or Android-based.
Plus my battery is a 30,000 mAh Aluminum Oxide-Air battery which can take millions of charges without memory effect or degradation. It also has 4 Terabytes of SYSTEM RAM (built-onto the CPU chip itself!) and over 16 Terabytes of Non-volatile storage memory kind of like an SSD but much FASTER!
We built the RAM and SSD-like storage that onto the 3D-stacked CPU/GPU/DSP chip itself which is WHY the phone is a full 25 mm or ONE inch thick!!! We make all our own CPU's, RAM Memory, Hard Drives and Image Sensors gear since we ARE a Billion-dollar Aerospace company!
Like I said.... I don't have to deal with the plebes and minions of smartphones when I have the KING KAHUNA BURGER of IP-69/Milspec-810-G super-ruggedized SUPER-Smartphones!
Bwaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh !!!!!!
I WIN !!!!!!!!
V
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