* Posts by StargateSg7

805 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2017

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Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

I'm not on the browser project BUT we do have a 20 Devs team on it and they ran the source code on over 200 different microprocessors and like 50+ operating systems at 32, 64, 128 and 256 bits wide WITH and WITHOUT grid-processing-enabled and networked GPUs attached!

On our largest display system, we had 1,048,576 separate web browser tabs open using a single instance of the browser itself BUT having each tab be sand-boxxed and using a virtual thread system where we group individual tabs into hard-interrupt-based processing loops assigned to a specific CPU core to ensure graphics and multimedia files are scheduled properly with their specified frame rates and audio sample rates. RACE conditions simply CANNOT OCCUR and memory leaks due to garbage JAVA or HTML code from a website is automatically and seamlessly garbage-collected and kept within a virtualized jail cell. The memory accesses and allocations/de-allocations simply cannot escape the set-aside secured memory space. Think of it as DISK QUOTAS for browser tabs! Even the cookies are assigned their own memory/disk space area and data-size-quota and CANNOT access or use data from any other web browser tab so all browser tabs think they are the only browser instance and browser tab running! On an 8-core ARM system such as a Samsung tablet, we usually use 75% of available cores so we can consistently run 20 hard-interrupt-based thread loops (aka tabs) per core so that means 120 browser tabs open at the same time with no issues on the multimedia side of things and NO memory leaks!

Our largest processor (256 bits wide) gets 8 tabs per virtualized thread and since we used 8192 cores at 16 virtual threads per core on a test run that is 1,048,576 tabs open at once within a single web browser instance and ALL of those tabs have extensive incoming audio/video/metadata multimedia streams running at the same time! And YES we have multiple 400+ Gigabit lines coming in from Telus so our bandwidth is into the many Terabits per second so we can actually RUN this test in real-time.

Again, this is a culmination of 15+ years of tearing our hair out while using Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, MS Internet Explorer, Opera, Pale Moon, Brave, etc, etc. We KNOW what works and we KNOW what features we want so we coded the entire HTML5 and JAVA engine ourselves using our custom in-house built and grid-processing-enabled Object Pascal Language and IDE to be massively parallel processing enabled and multi-core enabled for maximum rendering speed and best memory management processes! We have been eating our own web browser software dog food now for over 10 years, so I think the body public can now get in on the action!

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Screw Firefox! We got something MUCH better as a Browser with Full HTML5+ compatibility AND a built-in Javascript interpreter that is MUCH MUCH FASTER than anything elseout there AND our HUUUUUUUUUGEST innovation is the world's FIRST sandboxxed fully-SHOR's Algorithm-resistant encrypted browser that sandboxxes EVERY browser tab in it's own memory space and keeps the display window there so no memory leaks occur PLUS it has Secure DNS ensuring your destination website browser code and any ads comes from KNOWN and VETTED sources! Anything else simply gets BLOCKED.

Since we control the entire display engine and wrote it entirely ourselves, we also offer our high-end Object Pascal-based just-in-time-compiled and fully-pre-compiled Object Pascal source code driver that can do 2D/3D graphics/video and high-end audio that DO NOT HAVE THE ridiculous memory leaks that all other browsers have when rendering or displaying still imagery and multimedia files! That code is also sooooo much easier to read and maintain because our graphics code has common-sense procedure/function names that allows distributed processing on a grid-based virtual display driver system

You can just write multi-platform Javascript and Object Pascal code just like you normally do in Lazarus or Delphi or our when using own built-in IDE system and you can get the FASTEST rendering times and most secure audio/video/metadata encryption period! Plus we wrote it to support ALL upcoming 128-bits and 256-bits wide microprocessors so one code-base works at 32-bits for constrained resource environments, 64 bits for modern gear and the upcoming 128/256-bits super-chips without any conversions needed!

We has used Mozilla FireFox exclusively for many years BUT we got so ticked off at all teh crashes and memory leaks that our company held a big board meeting and we were directed to write our own high performance browser that is CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector-grid-processing enabled and with much better sand-boxxes and much better DNS-secured Anti-Quantum Computer encrypted for best security and multimedia performance!

We now HATE FireFox with a passion and went over to our new system many years ago! That new Web Browser system is pretty much very-well-debugged now and quite ready for public release which will be happening this summer 2025!

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AMD's MI355X is a 1.4 kW liquid-cooled monster built to battle Nvidia's Blackwell

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

If you look in the comments section of the "Vrillon" video of the StargateSG7 youtube channel, you will note a full description of its capabilities. The tape-out design for the Combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector Array super-processor was espoused on various websites as being 128-bits when in fact it has been 256-bits for quite a few years now. This was done as a bit of "Information Warfare" to ensure world-wide business entities, major intelligence agencies and the body-public DISMISS US as a bunch of internet cranks.

That was done on purpose to obscure and confuse our true intentions which will be showcased publicly soon enough! There is a LOT of in-house research that can be done on base materials sciences, power and propulsion systems, visual and audio stealth, avionics, spintronics, aerospace systems, physics and medicine of all kinds, marine vessels and ground vehicles, adaptive and nightvision imaging systems, autonomous robotics, computer hardware and software systems and other types of data mining you can do with 20+ YottaFLOPS worth of data-centre supercomputing horsepower located in Northern British Columbia, Canada.

We have a VERY PUBLIC DEMO planned which WILL REMOVE ALL DOUBT about our capabilities!

Before that, you can download, modify and print-out the fully-ITAR-free tape-out design as worldwide fully-free and open source under multiple open source licencing terms including but not limited to GPL-3 licences. Even the 3D printer design that lets you burn the chip onto Borosilicate glass using inexpensive copper nanopowders, ceramic powder insulators and microcircuit/transistor dopants is fully free and open-source! The combined EDA chip design tools and our CAD/CAM/CAE/FEA/Simulation toolbar software is also ready for use to make whatever OTHER types of microcircuit designs you want whenever you want them at a consumer-friendly price point so keep looking and checking-up on NorthCanadianAerospace websites daily to finally see the welcome banner that shows that everything is up and running for immediate download.

You have asked and so you shall receive!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

OMG! Only 79 TeraFLOPS at 64-bits for the AMD MI355X?

We UTTERLY OBLITERATE THEM and we are running at now 256-bits wide which is a heck of an improvement over our last-generation 128-bits wide Combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector Array super-processor (see StargateSG7 Youtube channel and NorthCaandianAerospace for further details about the upcoming super-chip!)

Our chips are the size of multiple bricks and literally consume a boatload of power BUT you can't fault the sheer number of PetaFLOPS we offer PER CHIP which is now into the 100+ PetaFLOPS range at a full 256-bits wide!

I feel sorry for NVIDIA and AMD! It's gonna be a downright round-house kick and knockout blow once this new super-chip Tape-Out design and all documentation gets exposed to the public for world-wide, fully-free and open source under open source licence terms in the next few weeks!

Trump official warns they're putting the squeeze on CHIPS Act winners

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Do ya want a REALLY REALLY BIG BANG FOR YOUR BUCK? How about worldwide FREE and completely Open Source?

Friday, June 6, 2025

NCA (North Canadian Aerospace) of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada is pleased to make a pre-announcement of their upcoming 256-bits wide combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector super-chip running at 10 THz clock speed made using multi-head electron-beam and laser-based Copper Powder Deposition and Sintering on Borosilicate glass substrates. By increasing the line trace widths and depths into the multi-Micron range (i.e. 60 microns wide at 100 microns deep!) and upping the voltage to 5 Volts, large scale increases in pure number crunching power have been realized within a 3D-stacked array of Borosilicate microcircuit dies that can be etched and 3D printed at your own office or home environment using common-off-the-shelf (COTS) components, materials and 3D printers.

The fully-ITAR-free chip Designed and Made Entirely in Canada is optimized for 3D printing within home/office/commercial environments for any person or company who downloads the tape-out design. We ensured that the final chip is optimized for low-cost of materials and to facilitate application-specific production runs without restriction as the end-user is able to easily modify the tape-out designs via the downloadable enhanced automated circuit design application toolset. We have also facilitated circuit production within non-optimal industrial conditions so as to allow DIY (Do It Yourself) microcircuit printing within home, office and commercial sites where high-level clean rooms are simply not available.

By using spectral domain processing techniques that use comb filters to bring optical frequencies down to the 10 Terahertz range, we are able to get a STABLE clock rate that is used for the on-board processing block synchronization, optical communications clocks, software defined radio (SDR), general purpose analogue and digital I/O ports, high-speed-capable global navigation system and other high-speed onboard sub-systems which will facilitate end-user-directed on-chip feature sets and allow for end-user-defined application-specific microcircuit inclusion on any final 3D printed super-chip product.

The following set of features is included within the tape-out super-chip design:

256-bits-wide Combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector Array Processor with 4096 hardware processing cores at 16 virtual threads per core for 65,536 total threads running at 10 THz clock speed sustained for 256-bits wide Floating Point, Fixed Point and Integer arithmetic.

The entire chip tape-out design is 3D printed on layered stacks of 200 mm by 200 mm by 3 mm thick Borosilicate glass plate dies using multi-head electron-beam and laser-enabled copper powder-deposition and sintering techniques that create line trace widths of 60 microns wide at 100 microns thick running at 5 volts for optimal clock stability and for mitigating RFI/EMI, crosstalk and inductive loads.

Individual Borosilicate glass layer dies are stacked vertically and interspersed with dialectric cooling plates that are 5 mm thick hollow-tube-etched ceramic plates for fast thermal transfer capability, and each cooling plate is filled with silicone oil rapidly circulated in and out of each plate for best cooling of the above and below CPU die layer. An entire super-chip can be 3D printed at home in less than 72 hours for a per-unit cost of less than $300 CDN ($250 USD) which has number-crunching performance that surpasses every current 2025-era T500 supercomputer system on the planet!

This type of super-chip microcircuit die construction allows for working super-chips to be 3D-printed at home or in your office using common 3D printers that have micro-particle copper powder deposition capabilities. We use nano-powder-based dopant deposition and diffusion techniques plus a further application of high-heat resistant dialectric ceramic powders to get the semiconductor and insulator portions of the circuitry done correctly. Much smaller CMOS and GaAs substrates are supported and those tape-out designs will be released soon after which can use common photolithography and chemical etching techniques to shrink the high-performance die layers down to a few square CM in area.

If you need a working design for a 300 mm by 300 mm working area 3D microcircuit multi-head e-Beam and Laser Etching/Powder-deposition/Sintering printer able to make this super-chip at your own facilities, we have that design too available for you to download for free along with our in-house designed and coded EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software tool set which also has advanced 2D-XY and 3D-XYZ circuit design and simulation along with CAD/CAM/CAE/FEA as part of the software tool set!

P.S. They Lied! It's really a 256-bit wide at 10 THz superchip and not a mere 128-bits wide! And it's a heck of a lot more than 50 PetaFLOPS sustained!

Intel, AMD, ARM, Qualcomm, Huawei, Samsung, TSMC, IBM are soooooooo Royally Rottenly Screwed and Toasted in the next few weeks!

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Need for speed? CityFibre punts 5.5 Gbps symmetrical broadband at ISPs

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Telus here in Vancouver, Canada has been offering 1 Gigabit and 3 Gigabit Ethernet for a years now and you can even get 10 Gigabit to the home these days on many major brands if you pay a nice premium. Anybody know what the monthly costs is for your European ISP services? Here in Vancouver with 3 Gigabit Internet with cable TV package and digital home phone service package that has free continent-wide calling between 5 named friends is about $190 CDN or $160 USD or 120 Euros per month so I'm curious what the prices are over the other side of the pond.

Chip designers latest casualties in US-China trade war

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Ha ha! This is total BS on the IP of EDA tools and the USA having ANY SAY on who or who does not have access to those tools! The next few days will be a DOOZY once we introduce our fully-ITAR-FREE (i.e. NO USA involvement in design and manufacturing for our in-house-built software OR hardware whatsoever!) 128-bits wide, 2 THz clock speed combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector processor tape-out design for y'all to download, 3D-print and/or modify to your heart's delight ALL UNDER world-wide, fully-free and open source under multiple open source licences including but not limited to GPL-3 for the design, manufacturing processes, the final hardware and all software and documentation and help media!

The USA and Intel, AMD, IBM, ARM, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Samsung, TMSC, Huawei, NEC, Sony, etc are ALL SCREWED with our design! And I should note that we have some of the WORLD'S ABSOLUTE BEST CHIP DESIGNERS and EDA developers here at work in Canada and NCA (North Canadian Aerospace)!

All Yours!

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P.S. I designed and coded the real-time 2D-XY/3D-XYZ SOBEL and CANNY edge detection, pixel-to-vector conversion and Million+ objects per frame automated object recognition and tracking code and multiple RGBA/YCbCrA/HSLA/CMYKA and other pixel processing and line/curve/fill drawing routines for this super-processor chip!

How Java changed the development landscape entirely as code turns 30

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Weird how I know so many Canadians who helped develop the JAVA language and the APIs that underscore it all. It feels like half of Queens University, University of Toronto, Waterloo, University of Calgary and University of British Columbia computer science departments ended up working on it! I remember one of the BIG CODING GURUS from Calgary (i.e. Mike Duigou) who ended up on the Java Core Libraries Team at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) doing the core JAVA development that literally pulled all of it together! AMAZING GUY who could rewrite MAC OS assembler WHILE it was running! He was THAT GOOD at coding!

If it wasn't for Canada, there would NOT be Apple iOS, there would NOT be any Android OS and NO Java and JavaScript would exist!

YAY Canada!

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Plan to keep advanced chips from China with tracking tech gains support in Congress

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: Where can buy one? Temu?

Goto the North American Aerospace website in Summer 2025 and download the tape-out files, all documentation AND the 3D printer construction files. We made this 128-bits wide Superchip to specifically to be able to be built at home using Borosilicate glass plates that are $25 CAD ($20 USD) each and copper nano-powder that is 3D printed using laser sintering for a mere $55 CAD ($40 USD) per bag. The rest of the printer and chip etcher parts can easily be bought at Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Amazon, Temu or Aliexpress.

We put a LOT of thought into this and made sure even high-schoolers could make and built them! Everything was designed to be as error-correcting as possible which is WHY we chose the 60 micron line trace widths and 100 micron line trace depths AND Borosilicate Glass for the dies! We know what we are doing! There's a 100+ eggheads working on this for a VERY long time and they ain't dumb! Even the Operating System software is very forgiving and error-correcting because these are NOT clean-room conditions so there has to be a lot of "slop" be allowed during the 3D printing of such a device at home. Most everyone else is making things much much smaller in terms of chip-making processes while we went completely the opposite by making everything physically much larger and higher-powered (5 volts+) to ensure things work!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Only us older coders would get the reference in the headline "Every shipment you make, every FLOP you generate, Uncle Sam will be watching you" to the 1980's song Every Breath You Take by The Police aka Sting! Good job Register article writers and editors!

LOL!

That said, this total Bollocks with tracking of GPUs by the USA is going to be COMPLETELY SUBVERTED since we here in Canada are disclosing as Worldwide, Completely Free and Open Source under Multiple Licence Terms including but not just limited to GPL-3 licence terms, the full tape-out design and all documentation for our fully-ITAR-free 128-bits super-processor chip which is a combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector processor! It WAAAAAAAAAAAAY OUT-PERFORMS any NVIDIA, AMD or Intel GPU or CPU and completely undercuts what is being proposed!

Since it's line traces and transistors are much larger-than-normal at 60 microns wide and 100 microns deep on 200 mm by 200 mm (20 cm by 20 cm) stacked borosilicate glass plates, you can make these superchips at home DIY (Do It Yourself) using copper powder deposition and laser sintering using our also-free downloadable multi-head 3D printer design and then run them at 5 Volts at 2 THz for 50 PetaFLOPS sustained at 128-bits for the Floating Point, Fixed Point and Integer operations!

This is what our superchip design contains:

128-bits-wide Combined-CPU-GPU-DSP-Vector Array Processor with 1024 cores at 8 threads per core for 8192 total threads running at 2 THz clock speed and 50 PetaFLOPS Sustained for 128-bits wide Floating Point, Fixed Point and Integer arithmetic. Has 200 mm by 200 mm multi-layer Borosilicate glass stacked dies with copper line traces of 60 microns wide at 100 microns thick running at 5 volts for optimal clock stability and mitigating RFI/EMI, crosstalk and inductive loads. Dies are interspersed with cooling plates that are 5 mm thick hollow-tube-etched aluminum plate for fast thermal transfer capability, and each cooling plate is filled with silicone oil rapidly circulated in and out of each plate for best cooling of the above and below CPU die layer.

The processor has the following built-in functionality:

a) Built-in SDR (Software Defined Radio) for 100 MHz to 120 GHz bandwidth transceiver capability.

b) On-board fractal antennae with 32-bits per sample ADC/DAC and DSP (Digital Signal Processing) with 240 Gigasamples per channel (integer 32-bits per sample) at 128 channels of input and output.

c) Hardware-accelerated ASCII and UNICODE character string handling and search functions and advanced multi-parameter multi-language string search functions.

d) Powerful multi-state Boolean Logic processor with 0.00% to 100.00% weighted-state Expert System/A.I. acceleration

e) Tiled display support for up 128-displays each going up to 16,384 by 16,384 pixels resolution at up to 1000 fps video I/O with support for 32-bits, 64-bits and 128-bits wide pixels in RGBA, YcbCrA, HSLA, CMYKA, CIE-XYZA, CIE-LABA and Greyscale formats with hardware-accelerated 2D-XY/3D-XYZ line/curve drawing, fill functions and built-in real-time 2D-XY/3D-XYZ convolution kernels of 3x3/3x3x3, 5x5/5x5x5, 7x7/7x7x7 and 9x9/9x9x9 matrix sizes and presets-based video filters/image enhancement such as 2D-XY/3D-XYZ SOBEL/CANNY edge detection and pixel-to-vector conversion and A.I.-assisted object recognition.

f) Audio 128 channels input and 128-channels output at integer 32-bits per sample at 10 MHz sample rates with built-in real-time 2D-XY/3D-XYZ convolution kernels of 3x3/3x3x3, 5x5/5x5x5, 7x7/7x7x7 and 9x9/9x9x9 matrix sizes and presets-based audio filters, 128 built-in MIDI/MADI Input/Output/Passthrough audio ports and 2048 instruments/voices audio synthesizer with built-in ROM-based high-resolution instrument/voice samples, specialized sound effects and advanced noise-reduction systems, and high-quality A.I.-assisted speech-to-text conversion and A.I.-assisted text-to-speech conversion.

g) MEMS-based millimetre accuracy 3D-XYZ global location services and 3D-XYZ spatial orientation with Decimal Degrees for Lat/Long and metres for altitude with up to 0.000000000 to 259.999999999 global position accuracy levels and 0.000000000 to 999,999.999999999 metres for altitude accuracy. (i.e. millimetre-levels of positional accuracy)

h) Encrypted XML/JSON/Web Metadata Processor with multi-format 128-channels input and 128-channels output for real-time Audio/Video/Peripheral-Device formatted XML/JSON text, pixel and vector graphics overlays and binary or simple text metadata streams.

I) 128-stream input/128-stream output Quantum Computing Resistant, anti-Shor's algorithm encryption processor with support for current, future and legacy encryption standards

j) 128-port full-duplex dense-wave multiplexing fibre-optic communications router at Terabit+ data transfer speeds per optical port. The entire chip uses only optical ports for all off-chip I/O!

k) 128 of 65,536 by 65,536 2D-arrays of SIMD and MIMD vector processors for separate processing of 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit and 128-bits wide Floating Point, Fixed Point and Signed and Unsigned Integer values and 8-bit and 16 bit weighted-state boolean values for Expert System and A.I. processing. Vector processor supports for accelerated local-SIMD/MIMD-core storage and processing of 2D-XY/3D-XYZ convolution kernels of 3x3/3x3x3, 5x5/5x5x5, 7x7/7x7x7 and 9x9/9x9x9 matrix values.

I think that should put a few deep Halloween Super-Scares into basically EVERY CPU and GPU manufacturer since it's all FREE for you to download, build and use!

North Canadian Aerospace has it and YOU can get it Summer 2025!

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Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: Alternate approach :) ... otherwise known as Stupid Idea No. 2.

I drink Asbach Uralt German Brandy! It's about the same strength but tasted MUCH better!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: Alternate approach :) ... otherwise known as Stupid Idea No. 2.

Wait until the review at LTT -- You can download the designs yourself at North Canadian Aerospace (all one word in ca or com format) once it's up and running later this spring/early summer. We will be selling a finished product too but that requires the typical CSA/UL/FCC/DOC/EU/JP certifications, so while LTT/LMG (Linus Tech Tips/Linus Media Group) will do an initial review of the demo unit's number-crunching power and new 128-bits wide real-time multimedia-centric operating system, YOU can just download the design for the etcher/vacuum chamber (i.e. easy to do designs -- takes less than a week to build if you have some shop skills!) and build your own superchip for yourself.

A bag of high purity copper powder is less than $55 CDN ($45 USD) on Amazon and Borosilicate glass sheets are also less than $20 USD ($25 CDN) for 20 cm by 20 cm! The line traces are so wide and deep that DIY home-based systems can make this! When a modern $500 3D printer can now get down to 0.005 mm accuracy, it wasn't much of a stretch to use SOFTWARE to auto-correct for electron beam jitter, environmental vibrations, imperfect deposition, non-flat/rough-surface borosilicate glass sheets, general aerial contamination, imperfect vacuum deposition, confinement beam jitter, etc. In fact, we use all the mapped-out errors to our advantage to ensure that the final working product performs to specifications. Basically, we know that a home-based chip-making system is no-where near what a normal clean-room is BUT we intentionally combined and cancel-out all the accumulating errors so that the final product "Just Works"!

It sounds fantastic BUT it just works! Sometimes the eggheads/boffins CAN get the most crazy of ideas actually working in the real world!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: Alternate approach :) ... otherwise known as Stupid Idea No. 2.

Proof's in the pudding! Get Ready! I love this part when we show up at LTT (Linus Tech Tips -- He is a 30 minute drive from our offices!) with a big blue cube running at 50 PetaFLOPS at 128-bits wide! LTT doesn't know it yet, but his rather influential tech company is the FIRST we will be delivering a product to review AND he gets one of our 1000x1000 head electron beam etchers and vacuum deposition chambers and enough Borosilicate plates and deposition powder so he can make the Superchips chips at the LMG (Linus Media Group) office in Surrey, BC, Canada to showcase worldwide. Now THAT is a proper worldwide introduction demonstration!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: Alternate approach :) ... otherwise known as Stupid Idea No. 2.

Kinda hard to refute a working superchip or million! While I do note I'm NOT an electrical engineer, I get/understand the general explanation of what is being done here, but I will DEFER to the real eggheads/boffins in their more detailed explanations once they release the designs, plans, documentation, CAD/CAM/CAE/FEA/Simulation files, etc as world-wide fully free and open source!

Saying it's unmitigated garbage DOES NOT make it so!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: Alternate approach :) ... otherwise known as Stupid Idea No. 2.

Electron beam etching using 1000 by 1000 heads at 100 mm per minute with a vacuum chamber vapour deposition where confinement beams based upon optical energy ensure the copper vapour ONLY goes into the etched line trace portions as each head etches a line-trace channel of about 100 microns deep and 60 microns wide. The deeper channel prevents the electrons from doing a skin or near-surface effect transport within the copper traces once we cover the channels with a thick layer of borosilicate glass insulator covering. (The electrons will NOT tunnel through the borosilicate glass!)

For the transistors (p-N junctions aka diodes), we use the same technology except you are depositing/diffusing an insulator, semiconductor and dopant in layers. The dopant is confined separately and DIFFUSES into the desired layer and depth due to the optical heating (i.e. basically a laser) which can ACCURATELY be controlled due to the beam size at red, green and blue wavelengths and the ability to control the pulsing duration to ensure a dopant or anode/cathode of Boron, Silicon or Germanium and you can layer and diffuse the insulator and dopants to get you a MOSFET/FINFET transistor in whatever configuration you like. (i should note that I am NOT an MSc.EE so this explanation may be a little wonky!)

I barely understand the process myself but it works and I will leave it to the eggheads for a better explanation and I will go back to coding 2D-XY and 3D-XYZ SOBEL edge detectors and pixel-to-vector convertors!

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: Alternate approach :) ... otherwise known as Stupid Idea No. 2.

Please do tell me WHY you downvoted simple FACTS: In the UK, the average electricity price is 27 pence per kilowatt/hour (kWh) or 48 cents CAD or 35 cents USD for those on the standard variable tariff and who are paying by Direct Debit. For those on other tariff plans, charges could be as high as 54 pence per kilowatt/hour or 99 cents CAD or 71 cents USD.

Here in British Columbia, Canada, the average household price for BC Hydro electricity in daylight hours is 12 cents CAD or 6.5 pence per kilowatt/hour. In off-hours or at pre-paid bulk prices I can get it down to as low as 8 cents CAD or 4.3 pence per kilowatt/hour! You are PAYING A FORTUNE for electricity in the UK and probably even MORE in certain parts of mainland Europe!

Downvoting ACTUAL FACTS is not OK! It just makes you look IGNORANT!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: Alternate approach :) ... otherwise known as Stupid Idea No. 2.

That is EXACTLY what you do! You INCREASE the die size and use more volts and amps to push those electrons though wider copper, aluminum or conductive polymer line traces all spaced farther apart on Borosilicate glass substrates for LESS cross-talk and RFI/EMI issues! At NCA (North Canadian Aerospace), we run our custom fully-ITAR-free, in-house designed and made 200 mm by 200 mm combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector processor dies at 5 V at 10 amps or 12 V at 24 amps to ensure 2 THz performance which gives us 50 PetaFLOPS at 128-bits of sustained quad-precision floating point performance!

The LARGER the die the more Integer, Fixed-Point and Floating-Point Number-Crunching PROCESSING POWER you can make! Of course, since we are in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada we have BC Hydro to supply their hydroelectric power for us to use, so we pay only 8 cents to 12 cents per kilowatt/hour of electricity which is a LOT CHEAPER than yours in Europe and the USA!

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Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

6.9 GW converted to Brake Horsepower is about 9,253,052 BHP which means about 12 of the GE (General Electric) Harriet-class natural-gas-powered turbines (600 Megawatts) should about do it and at about $10 million USD for a full install price per turbine it's only about $120 million USD for the whole package to power that fancy 6.9 Gigawatt MASER/LASER/PARTICLE BEAM setup on a continuous basis to down planes, trains, automobile and even turn people into piles of carbon ash in 5 seconds or less! That's not too bad of a price to pay for full-service beam-based destruction at the touch of a button!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Nope! We work at NCA (North Canadian Aerospace aka our mainstream media pseudonym) which is an underground/under-the-radar, fully-ITAR-free all-Canadian manufacturer of aerospace products based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada! We do applied-research and fully-in-house-custom-make DCI-128K at 64-bit-RGBA cameras, 1024-core 2THz 50 PetaFLOPS at 128-bits wide combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector super-computer processors, Electrostatic-propulsion/GWASER-based spaceplanes, 64-bit RGB+Distance RADAR/Optical/IR/UV/XRay/Gamma imaging satellite systems, 6-axis, ultra-fast 1000-head polymer/ceramic-powder/metal-powder 3D printers, and a number of other high-tech products! We also put twin turbo-jet engines of 70,000 lbs of thrust each into all-Carbon-fibre custom-built 100 foot long Deep-V ocean race boats and Custom-CNC-machined 3000 HP Sapphire-Ceramic-coated all-Titanium V12 race engines into Ford F450 Superduty trucks! We even make full-size autonomous and ROV-operated robot dinosaurs such as T-Rex that have 12 inch long (30 cm) ultra-sharp Vanadium/Nickel/Cobalt-cryo-hardened Stainless Steel teeth!

There! That should about do it for telling you who I work for!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Using SDR (Software Defined Radio) source code and multiple COTS (Common Off the Shelf) CPU or SoC chips that are PRECISELY interleaved with a common timing circuit and delay lines can sample/resample parts of ANY waveform using just their GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins and use software to combined the interleaved parts to digitize ANY waveform (i.e. ADC - Analogue to Digital Converter) from 100 MHz up to 120 GHz at up to 32 bit resolutions per sample and sample rates at up to 10 Gigasamples per second and then also use the same GPIO pins to reconstruct an analogue waveform (i.e DAC aka Digital to Analogue Converter) from 100 MHz to 120 GHz which can be used for burst-rate frequency-hopping and spread-spectrum communications that are pretty much UNJAMMABLE!

I can also tell you that ANY general purpose CISC, SoC or RISC chip with a clock speed from 500 MHz to 5 GHz can be combined and interleaved to sample waverforms normally needing VERY EXPENSIVE ultra-highspeed GaN (Gallium Nitride) or GaAs (Gallium Arsenide) circuitry!

There! I fixed your jamming problems in an INEXPENSIVE and EASY off-the-shelf manner!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Liquid fuel is the BEST and has the highest stored energy value for drone operations! We do it all the time at our facilities! We make lightweight ceramic bottles filled with Butane or Propane or even methanol with an embedded high-pressure ball-valve/mini-regulator that provides a pressurized fuel to a Thermo-Cell which creates heat and electrical power from a simple and well-timed chemical reaction that works up to TWO HOURS for a 10 lbs drone. Those ceramic pressurized fuel bottles are stamped-out by the THOUSANDS. The RFI/EMI/EMP/RAD-hardened motors are ceramic-coated for high heat resistance and the electrical rotor drive motors themselves are shielded Cobalt-Samarium magnets + ceramic coated windings and ferrite core for thermal and induction overload protection.

And we can stamp them out CHEAPLY using 20 tonne presses that punch out a multi-layer sheet-metal and plastic monocoque body for optimal aerodynamics in less than 30 seconds!

IT'S NOT THAT HARD to do!

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Re: Shielding.

You can use fully sealed shells of muMetal, or 24 gauge (0.5 mm) sheet metal boxes of Zinc-Galvanized Steel layers interspersed with 2 mm thick nylon or HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) film-sheets and another layer of Zinc-galvanized sheet steel. You can also use half-inch thick (12 mm) solid Tungsten as the ULTIMATE in Faraday caging and use fibre-optics for all outside-of-box communications using an S-shaped optically-clear lead-crystal-lens fibre optic communications port that prevents RFI/EMI/EMP/RAD from entering the box!

In our own drone systems, we use the Tungsten boxes with dialectric Silicone Oil immersion-based CPU/DSP/GPU-motherboard and RAM cooling and we then cover the box with 5 mm thick layers of Zircon and Boride/Carbide intumescent paint and ceramic layers that can withstand 4000 degrees Celcius temperatures coming from RF/MM-wave systems or Lasers/Masers!

For the motors, we use EMI/RFI/EMP/RAD-hardened high-heat-resistant Cobalt-Samarium magnets (400 Celcius rated!) and ceramic-coated copper coils and ceramic-coated ferrite cores for the 4 to 16 ducted-fan drive motors that are EACH self-powered with a propane or butane thermocell that lasts almost 2 hours! The rotors and ducted fan housings are also ceramic coated to prevent Laser/Maser-based drone defence systems. We even have on-board impact/spall-protection fragmentation defence systems and multi-layer/multi-hit .50 CAL capable ceramic-plate armouring to ensure flight-worthiness after an encounter with ballistic defences!

Flight control imaging systems are RF/MM-wave/RGBA/IR and UV-based multi-spectral imaging with a backup Inertial Guidance System accurate to about 10 metres with no augmentation and down to 50 cm with RF/MM-wave augmentation. We also use thick 2mm shielded and Varistor-isolated silicone oil-cooled Fractal Antennas that use Spread-Spectrum and Frequency-Hopping technology to prevent action by drone defence systems!

AND this all weighs less than 10 to 250 lbs depending on the drone size and any ordnance it carries!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: The missing detail

In 1999 the USA's CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) created In-Q-Tel which was a private but CIA-run for-profit company that STILL funds worldwide private sector research and development into ground breaking fields including drone defence and offence AND in fuel-cell-based drone propulsion system and autonomous flight control! BAE (British Aerospace) ALSO has a separate private investment company that does the same thing AND MI5 and MI6 have cooperated on creating a company that does the same thing! I do remember a news announcement in 1995 about that but I just can't remember off the top of my head what its name was! The UK started the trend of intelligence agencies running private companies to invest in private research and develop but the US-based In-Q-Tel today rules the roost with OVER THREE BILLION U.S. DOLLARS worth of investment in various companies world-wide!

And NO !!! None of them invest in us! NCA (North Canadian Aerospace) is Fully Self-Funded! Why do you think I know so much about drones and 3D-battlespace C4SIR and autonomous flight control? I actually DEVELOPED the ENTIRE vision recognition and CODEC software suite to do so! Not to brag too much but my real-time Audio/Video/Metadata CODECs and SOBEL/CANNY and RGBA/HSLA/Greyscale DSP image processing code that I developed works wonders at multi-channel/multi-spectral DCI-4K/8K/16K/32K/64K and even DCI-128K resolutions at up to 10,000 fps at 64-bit RGBA/IR/UV/MM-wave/RF/XRAY/Gamma Bands! I think I know of what I speak!

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A Fractal antenna can be directly 3D printed right onto an aerodynamic monocoque hull of a 2.2 lbs (1000 grams) drone that is then covered with intumescent paint which has up to 4000 Celcius of heat protection if you use Zircon and Carbides/Borides! The 250 MHz to 120 GHz radio waves STILL go through the ceramic and you can etch microchannels filled with dialectric silicone oil under the 2mm thick copper fractal antenna layer which will absorb heat from Laser or Maser-based drone defence systems.

Again, you put BIG varistors in-between the antenna and electronics and use DSP (Digital Signal Processors) to process and extract the antenna-inducted waveforms filled with spread-spectrum/frequency-hopping RF and MM-wave transmissions OR you fly using purely autonomous flight control using 2D-XY/3D-XYZ SOBEL/CANNY edge-detection with pixel-to-vector conversion with real-time object recognition of 3D terrain, land-features, buildings, ground objects, people, military hardware, etc. NO GPS or inertial guidance system needed at all!

For the fuel source, you put Butane or Propane in a small 10 cm long by 5 cm diameter fuel bottle that supplies a thermo-electric fuel cell the size of two decks of playing cards which supplies enough watts to power a drone for 30 minutes to one hour or even more! Then you hit your target with 250 grams to 500 grams of Semtex fitted inside of an ultra-sharp body-slicing fragmentation bottle made of light-weight Silicon Carbide or you can add a section filled with Napalm or Thermite incendiary or even a high-performance fuel-air mixture to use as a mini-thermobaric device that can wipe out a 25 to 50 metre radius in a MASSIVE shockwave-inducing item-and-person smashing fireball!

With modern Gigastamping technology, I could get a simple medium sized warehouse that could stamp-out an array of 100 by 100 of per minute of aerodynamically-optimized monocoque drone hulls that are fully rad-hardened and EMI/RFI/Laser/Maser Faraday Cage-shielded to make a MILLION PER DAY to overwhelm ANY drone defence! And with the fully-autonomous flight-control and SOBEL/CANNY/Vector object recognition software, I could DIRECTLY target and obliterate the defensive systems themselves and the persons running them! The ARM-based SOC (System-on-a-chip) only needs four channels of HD 1920 by 1080 video at 60 fps (front, back, left, right) and enough RAM memory to do the vision recognition work and SDR (Software Defined Radio) work needed and those chips are $35 USD each on a bulk order so each drone is CHEAP to make and quick to deploy! You set it and forget it!

Now THAT is proper Drone Warfare in a fully 3D-Battlespace of overwhelming-numbers of fully-autonomous aerial drone offensive action!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: How hard can it be to RFI/EMI and Radiation-Harden your electronics?

The drones we are talking about here are suicide drones made by 3rd parties who don't give a rat's arse about FAA or CAA regulations. They will create 2.2 lbs (1000 grams) shielded drones with 250 grams of Semtex in a tube of ultra light weight but super hard and body-slicing SHARP silicon carbine fragmentation lining that will obliterate a 30 metre radius around the drone once it detonates. They will use a cheap butane fuel cell source that lasts for 30 minutes to an hour and then the drone finds the target using onboard 2D-XY or 3D-XYZ SOBEL/CANNY edge detection and pixel-vectorization for real-time object recognition and then fly itself over to the target and THEN GO BOOM! No GPS needed! 3D terrain and 3D object recognition is ALL that is needed!

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Re: How hard can it be to RFI/EMI and Radiation-Harden your electronics?

for a 10 cm by 10 cm by 5 cm thick box made out of an outer layer of 0.5 mm thick galvanized steel sheet (i.e. 25 gauge sheet metal), a second layer of solid 0.5 mm thick nylon sheet and an inner layer of 0.5 mm thick galvanized steel sheet, the Faraday Shield box for your controller hardware and software weighs in at only 337 grams (0.337 kilograms or 0.743 pounds or 11.89 ounces!). That is more than enough shielding for the smaller drones against 250 Mhz and 120 GHz drone defences.

if you STILL want higher-end RFI/EMI/RAD-hardening, then use 1 mm thick (15 gauge) Zinc galvanized sheet steel with a 1 mm thick layer solid nylon sheet and another layer of 1 mm thick Zinc galvanized sheet steel at 10 cm by 10 cm by 5 cm thick which is more than enough room to hold your drone controller electronics! That heavier-duty Faraday shield box STILL only weighs 682 grams ( or 1.5 lbs or 24 ounces or 0.68 KG!) so it is STILL plenty lightweight for smaller suicide drone use that will overwhelm aerial defences!

AND to protect against Lasers and Masers, a higher-quality Zirconium-and-Tungsten-Ceramic-based Intumescent paint of 2 mm thick can protect against as much as 4000 Degrees Celcius for over 60 minutes making even THOSE beam-based drone defences a fully moot point! (i.e. look up Starlite and how to make Starlite on Youtube in order see how you can make high-heat protecting Intumescent paint at home!)

Now you know! The Math Works!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Bullocks! A quarter-inch thick (6 mm) thick box made out of Tungsten and use fibre-optics for internal communications to the Tungsten-shielded brushless motors and this drone defence system is DEFEATED! If the 6mm thick tungsten box is too heavy for containing the CPU controllers for your smaller drone, try thin sheets (1 mm) of Zinc-galvanized steel interspersed with glued-on 2 mm thick nylon sheets to form a Faraday Cage that works at multiple EM bands!

To cool your CPU electronics and drone controllers, immerse them fully in liquid silicone oil and use fins and heat-sinks to transfer the heat to the outside. For the antennas, use a multi-EM-band Fractal Antenna 3D printed directly on the outside of the drone hull and use a varistor in-between your sensitive electronics as a protection against RF induction overload! The Fractal antenna can be shaped for and 3D printed directly on the outer hull that will allow for 250 MHz up to 120 GHz radio operations using unjammable frequency-hopping and spread-spectrum modalities.

There! I fixed it! How hard can it be to RFI/EMI and Radiation-Harden your electronics?

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Heat can make Li-Ion batteries explode. Or restore their capacity, say Chinese boffins

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Re: Dendrites?

We did that with Camera Batteries (i.e. the large NP1b batteries used for Betacam SP and Digital Betacam shoulder mount TV NEWS camcorders!) and our specialty-reprogrammed battery charger system (i.e. a CADEX battery charger - look it up at their site since they still exist 30 years later!) was able to do that by cycling and recycling the battery at low and high charge voltages and currents to "refurbish" a NiCAD battery. We usually got about 3x the rated charge cycle life when we used that charger because at the time a high-end NP1b battery was $250 CDN each! It also worked for NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) NP1b batteries which were even MORE expensive ($350 CDN each!) at the time!

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White House attempts to 'explain' mystery drone sightings: The FAA authorized 'em

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All the youtube video that I have seen on the SMALL drones and the LARGE ones over the US state of New Jersey and elsewhere showed the TYPICAL red and white flashing lights MANDATED by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) that is required for night and BLOS (Beyond Line of Sight) operations! One of the BIG droves was a massive Hexacopter and even a Octocopter the size of a Honda Accord car so it was a HUUUUUGE drone! If you see the flashing red and white lights (or red and orange in some cases!) it means APPROVAL was given by the FAA for those night missions! So it was NO SECRET!

Some drones ALSO had the BLUE flashing lights indicating a FEDERAL policing agency was operating the drones such as DHS (Department of Homeland Security), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) or Federal Marshals. So those flights were NOT a secret to the FAA! So that means that MANY of the New Jersey drone sightings were federally-authorized night flights BUT were simply NOT disclosed to the general public.

HOWEVER, one drone video that I saw that actually crashed onto New Jersey highway I recognized as a LOYAL WINGMAN drone that is capable of carrying a 25 lbs to 250 lbs warhead or even carry and rapid-deploy a series of smaller suicide drones! That one DID NOT HAVE the red, white or blue flashing lights which means it was a secret MILITARY flight test!

AND ANOTHER drone I saw in a separate New Jersey video was one of THE SILENT ONES pill-shaped drones which are TS:SCI (Top Secret: Sensitive Compartmentalized Information) special projects which use Electrostatic Propulsion systems that don't need wings, propellers or jet engines to fly. They use planar waveguides and resonators to rapidly pulse EM band waveforms to repel the atmosphere away from the hull and use electromotive forces to fly and they are currently operated by JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) for highly secretive purposes needing extreme levels of visual and audio stealth! I have access to just such an Electrostatic Propulsion drone in the company hangar at YVR-NCA (North Canadian Aerospace in Vancouver, Canada) so I recognize some of the peripherals seen on that SILENT New Jersey drone!

Now You Know!

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Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

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Yup! I was on the main team that developed the software to model and interact in 3D on our DECstations and Sony NEWS workstations the MULTIPLE 8 km diameter hemispherical domes we found between 20 km to 60 km down. We did all the source code development work in C and Pascal and ran the reservoir synthetic seismic data model on an in-house set of NEC and CRAY YMP supercomputers and IBM-3090 400-series mainframe systems. It took WEEKS to model and output/render at 2048 pixels by 2048 pixels for display at 8 fps at 8-bits-per pixel paletted colour for 3D-XYZ rotational display on those 20 inch square pixel Sony Trinitron displays originally made for the FAA's air traffic control system. That was literally $150 million+ CDN worth of hardware!

The 8 km wide hemispherical domes of ABIOTIC oil were imaged using LF and ELF sonar (LF = Low Frequency and ELF = Extremely Low Frequency) at about ten feet (3 metres) per pixel resolution use quarter-wave and below fractions of the sonar imagers resolution so our worst-case calculation is 13,400,000,000 cubic metres (12.4 Billion Cubic metres) or 84,283,464,323 or 84 Billion Barrels in EACH DOME RESERVOIR and we found over 30 of them just in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba alone! At current 2025-era USA and Canada's typical drawdown rate of about 3 Million Barrels per day, EACH Abiotic Oil Dome is worth 28,094 days (76 years!) at current usage rates. With over 30 domes we found that is 2,309 YEARS worth of oil we could recover!

ABIOTIC oil is created by NON-ORGANIC high-heat and high-pressure hydrocarbon synthesis processes at deep rock-depths close to the upper mantle. It has very low-sulfur content and is considered Light Sweet Crude Oil aka the Very Best Kind of oil! Only in 2025 do we now have the technology to GET at that oil. We did model their reservoir locations in the 1980's and 1990's though!

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AND i should note that the STILL PHOTO of that hilltop in Windows XP cost Microsoft almost $500,000 USD to get and licence in perpetuity! It was NOT computer generated image but rather a real place! That was a very expensive hill! Another bit of Trivia is for Windows 95 when Microsoft paid the Rolling Stones around THREE MILLION USD for the rights to the song "Start Me Up" to celebrate the birth of the Start Button in the codenamed Chicago OS aka Windows 95 operating system!

And finally, Windows XP was codenamed Whistler and Windows Vista was codenamed Blackcomb after the dual-mountain Ski Resort of Whistler-Blackcomb located a hundred KM north of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada! The two OS'es were code-named after the famous party resort which is the largest ski resort in North America --- They call them the Mile High Mountains in terms of multi-run ski-able vertical feet --- and of course MANY Microsoft employees partied there from Friday afternoon to Sunday night after driving up from Microsoft's Redmond, Washington campus! There are also many 20 to 45-year-olds still yearning and looking askingly for their as-of-yet-unknown Microsoft parentage due to that location!

Now You Know!

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Re: Invisible Techno-Magic

Technically, Oracle and IBM DB2 RDBMS systems (Relational Database Management Systems) did that where they pre-allocated data near the middle of the disk or near certain heads and that sector or set of sectors was locked down made unmoveable and contained only the most-used data records or most system-critical data records. With SSD (Solid State Drives) that is no longer needed and once fully optical RAM comes to the masses then it's also moot points since you are accessing data literally at light speed!

Still at the time in the 1960's to 1980's where drive-parameter-specific RDBMS systems were common place it was also common to lock down data within certain sector of a disk drive in order to get the best performance or best data integrity/safety!

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Sony made the BEST workstation-class PC's back in the day! I had HUNDREDS of them at our old workplace! NEWS was basically Sony's version of X-windows workstations and it was GREAT to use! Only NextStep was better! I also used a LOT of DECstations back in the 1980's doing Calgary's oil & gas reservoir modelling and synthesis AND our VAX-9000 supercomputer cluster centre in Calgary was the one that found all those 20 KM to 60 KM deep ABIOTIC OIL reservoirs that have MANY TRILLIONS of barrels of Light Sweet Crude Oil (i.e. little Sulfur content!) sitting in multiple 8 km wide (5 miles) reservoirs deep in the Earth under British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba! We are just now in 2025 getting the technological ability to drill down to 20 to 60 km deep to get at that ABIOTIC OIL! A ten thousand year supply of petro-products awaits us!

I should note I am likely waaaaaay older than you! I was using IBM-360's, AS-400's, VAX-780's, XEROX workstations and Commodore PET computers back in my day! I'm so old that VT-100 terminals, MITS and Project Athena are still kicking around in my mind!

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Anybody ever use SunOS/Early Solaris, IBM OS2 Warp, Sony NEWS, Amiga 4000, Atari ST, NextCube or DecStation windows interfaces? If YES, then that means you are an almost-dead ULTRA-OLD IT horse! LOL!

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Re: Deliver something worthwhile?

I kinda did the same with my old workplace servers back in the day in the Early 2000's where they literally gave away to various employees and others over 100 of the 4-cpu Xeon rackable 4-RU box servers that were bought for around $50,000 CDN each ($35,000 USD or 31,000 Euros). And once the accounting department ran them down to ZERO dollars CDN on the expense books after their 4 year lease plus one year buyout financing payback term was done, the company just ripped them all out and went with AMD server CPUs and GPUs and gave away the zero-book-value computers to everyone in the office who wanted one. Anything else was donated to charity! I had 8 of the four-CPU Xeon boxes running for a while doing datamining for my personal high-tensile strength metal materials research and development. At the time, those server boxes had 16 Gigabytes of RAM which was an ENORMOUS amount of RAM memory for the time! I eventually sent those servers for free to some high-school kids in Calgary by the 2010's who used them for gaming and LAN parties!

It was a fun time to be able to get all those free servers, Cisco fully-managed routers and fancy optical switches!

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As a Canadian in teh Metro Vancouver area, I can tell you a bit of historical trivia about the Windows LONGHORN codename that was named after the very famous Longhorn Saloon located in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada (Was there just last weekend under perfect ski conditions!) which was a common Microsoft employee watering hole for those who made the trip up from the Redmond, Washington Microsoft campus on Friday winter afternoons! Lots of good food and drink and Friday/Saturday nights were legendary! Lots of unknown Microsoft progeny still looking for their long-lost parentage were made after a drunken night at that place!

I had an alpha Longhorn version myself that was part of an industry partner developer evaluation program and while it WAS DOGFOOD, it wasn't bad at all on daily use for us database application development teams! I even had a rudimentary version of WinFS with the SQL-like and the optional 4th gen natural language query file data search system. THAT WAS GREAT! They should have kept that! When I started using Windows 8, it became OBVIOUS which parts had some LONGHORN OS pedigree but I actually preferred the WinFS option by a long-shot!

Raymond Chen was head of Microsoft Research at the time doing the Longhorn internals leadership and Dave Cutler was posted as head of the entire project for a bit but I could see even then, this was NOT the original Windows NT project where only a SMALL TEAM of easier-to-manage core programmers was doing a new SkunkWorks-like operating system. This was a MULTI-HUNDRED bureaucratic and ultra-hierarchical team with a TWO THOUSAND+ personnel support network all having their fingers in the pie! They should have kept the team to 20 people MAX like the original Windows NT team!

It was IMPOSSIBLE to manage! It took more time just to pass along the daily messages between all or portions of one or more teams than it took to recognize and fix any given issue or mistake! Unfortunately, Microsoft tried to do a PROJECT SCALE-OUT at a time when a focus on CORE functionality was key! Ironically, the method Linus Torvalds uses for Linux kernel development would have been an IDEAL MANAGEMENT STYLE for getting Longhorn Done and Out to the public!

This was a time when Microsoft snatched DEFEAT from the Jaws of Victory by trying to scale-up and scale-out on a system that DID NOT NEED THAT TYPE of management style! A single 20-person CORE TEAM divided into four 5-person teams handling Graphics/User Interface/Threading, WinFS/Object-Database Handling, Networking/Communications and general Application-Compatibility, was ALL that was needed and no more! And they should have reported directly to Cutler and NOT to any in-between middle-management lackeys! Anybody outside of that core should ONLY have been doing testing and quality control!

At least we now have Real-time Linux Distros and Windows Server! They Still Work GREAT!

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Trump says US should kill CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

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Who cares WHAT the USA does anymore in chips! They are no longer relevant to CPU and Memory chips! Sheeeeesh! I am using an all-Canadian, Full-ITAR-free, completely in-house designed and manufactured 128-bits wide combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector processor on my desktop NOW and it works GREAT and BLOWS AWAY any Intel, AMD, Apple, IBM, Qualcomm or Huawei CPU out there! 2 THz at 50 PetaFLOPS sustained!

Yay Canada!

We Win The Chip Wars AND the Hockey Games!

NCA !!!! NCA !!! NCA !!!

aka North Canadian Aerospace

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Openreach tests 50 Gbps broadband – don’t expect it anytime soon

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Here in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada our local internet provider/telephone company Telus has it's Telus PureFibre 3 Gigabit Home Ethernet package which has your Internet and multiple programme cable and movie channel packages of 4K video for about $140 CDN per month ($110 USD or $100 Euros). We can even get 10 Gigabits full Duplex at a bit of a premium and in certain urban/suburban locations, we can now order 100 Gigabits per second. If I goto a business plan with an outright purchase of one of the higher-end optical routers, Telus now lets me buy a 400 Gigabits per Second Internet bundle. The only problem with that is not even GOOGLE/Youtube connects at 400 Gigabits per second or even 100 gigabits per second so it's used more for site-to-site 4K/8K video upload/download or super-heavy data transfer uses, so instead I make do with 10 Gigabit Ethernet for the home office!

Just thought I would let you know what internet is like over on this side of the world is like!

Our mobile phone plans though are atrociously expensive compared to Europe!

It's usually about $70 CDN ($50 USD or 45 Euros) for North America calling and 20 gigabytes per month data plans!

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Amazon-backed X-energy bags $700M more for itty-bitty nuke reactors that don't exist yet

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Total rip-roaring BS! Lockheed Martin has had their 40 MEGAWATT small form factor reactor for almost TEN YEARS now! It's barely the size of four home refrigerators (8 cubic metres) and has been powering some secretive US Navy hardware and some specialized Fixed Base Installations for about the same 10 years now! Looks great! No radiation leaks and works JUST FINE for continuous output at said 40 Megawatts. Some eggheads in a certain secretive location (Utah) even put one on a plane!

They can be aggregated together for GIGAWATTS of city-grid-scale continuous output. The reactor, with the appropriate fueling cycle schedule will physically last around 50 years with almost no degradation to the vessel walls. Radiation-induced Hydrogen embrittlement is no longer a big issue! Even the previously problematic Plasma arcing/pitting issue is now mostly solved.

I know all this on a personal level .... SO THERE YOU HAVE IT!

Get that fancy pants golf-hound Donald J. Trump to declassify it all! It's Not That Hard.

He just needs to sign another Executive Order to declassify the Lockheed Martin Small Form Factor Reactor System and get is sold for public use!

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How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

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Re: Majored in grey

Amiga was kept alive in the late 1980's with the Video Toaster linear video editing system in a box which NO ONE ELSE HAD for any price! For less then $10,000 USD you could buy yourself an NTSC or PAL television studio in a box that let you do corporate video cheaply, quickly and with reasonable quality! Our own Betacam SP/HDcam/Pinnacle-3D/Quantel editing suite was originally $1.5 Million dollars and the various versions of the Video Toaster bricked it all when we put it into our trucks.

In between computer programming and IT work, I did a lot of high-end broadcast video work including EFP camera and editing work for corporate video and even big league sports. Even though we had lots of EXPENSIVE component RGB/YCbCr broadcast gear running into the many millions of USD, we STILL used the Video Toaster running on an Amiga for high-end aerospace company video and world-wide broadcast sports events! We even put a radiation-shielded Amiga and a Video Toaster INTO SPACE for a short period of time doing custom 29.97 fps live real-time 480i resolution space video imaging and broadcast!

Nowadays, Black Magic Resolve running on an AMD Threadripper system can do live cutting and mixing for 4K/8K broadcast and since i'm going to Cortina Olympics 2026 for Camera/Editing, I expect we will use systems that fit on workstation-grade laptops that can stream LIVE in DCI-4K and DCI-8K resolutions. We will be using 8K resolution Canon R5 II's or (or R5-3's by then) as the video cameras, so its just a really SMALL amount of gear that is needed compared to the MANY TRACTOR TRAILERS we used to use for such live events!

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An interesting side note with Taligent (i.e. P-ink) object oriented operating systems that Apple and IBM were co-developing, was that THEIR CODE set in motion the start of JAVA and Javascript and two HUUUUUGE names coming out of it I remember were two Canadian guys from Sun Microsystems and Oracle named James Gosling who invented JAVA and Mike Duigou who was an UTTER GENIUS assembler code who has like 30+ patents who did stuff for Adobe too! James started the mainstreaming of object-oriented programming above and beyond what NEXT started! Mike Duigou's code started the peer-to-peer networking revolution and started object-oriented peer-to-peer communications which ended up starting the social media revolution including the codebase that ended up in Facebook and even BitTorrent! Those two CANADIAN guys literally helped start ALL of the modern internet object-oriented data storage and peer-to-peer/social media communications revolution we see today!

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Re: Of course NT 3 was great, it was VMS after all

LOL! My other older boss in the Commodities Trading/Financial Services industry is STILL running his 1989/1990-era VAX-9000's using COBOL-based financial transaction software. They started converting everything still running on the VAX-9000 systems into JAVA about 25+ years ago and 5 years after than then built-their own in-house developed real-time multi-core OS Lazarus-style IDE with a multi-core GPU enhanced highly-speed-optimizing ObjectPascal compiler that has a super-fast C/C++-like pre-processor added-in for extra functionality!

Parts of it are now running on a few racks of the newer dual 128-core AMD EPYC processor motherboards with four AMD Server GPUs on each mobo and hundreds of Terabytes of globally shared System RAM. That project is now on it 21st year and should be fully done by 2028, so those VAXes still have to run for another 3 years as the primary runtimes beside the new system! The in-house programmers are making a fortune and will probably start retiring after the project is finally done and fully deployed! The interesting thing is that the VAXes are STILL holding their own on certain types of simultaneous high-Input/Output commodities transactions even though the new hardware is LOADS FASTER than the VAXes! I am told that once everything is done, deployed and tested he will use the in-house software to scale-up and scale-out all the hardware inside a custom-built datacentre located in northwestern Ontario so he can take advantage of the cheap hydro-power electricity.

He should have bought a more modern IBM Z-frame but I think my old boss has a soft-spot for those VAX-9000's which he is eventually going to put into his own personal home computer systems museum (i.e. he has HUNDREDS of vintage computing systems ALL still working and some are from the 1950's -- And YES! He has a very large house in a rather posh area of greater Toronto to fit all that vintage gear in!)

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Re: Single Input Queue

I am fairly sure that was RBC (aka Royal Bank of Canada) which had like 100,000+ copies of OS/2 running as ATM operating systems and as internal banking operations which were running EVEN into the 2000's! Then they switched to Windows XP which i STILL see running on some machines in 2024/2025!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: ======> Where are the printer drivers?

You had to buy an old Epson FX-80 dot-matrix printer which worked with EVERYTHING in order to get printing on OS/2! For its time it was an AMAZING piece of technology which was a LOT cheaper than that fancy and FAST line-printer or laser-copier that IBM was selling for like $50,000 USD as a networked printer system! Epson sold a LOT of FX-80 dot-matrix printers to DEC VAX, IBM Mainframe and UNIX or OS/2 shops back in the day because so many people were writing custom hardware/software drivers for it that you could download teh source code from various BBS'es!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: BBS

Was in Calgary, Canada at the time and we had a whole network of Gandalf Hybrid modems at the time and AGT (Alberta Government Telephones) was HEAVILY regulated and could NOT charge the Arm and a Leg that AT&T did in the U.S. !!! Our monthly rates were a LOT CHEAPER that yours in the USA or the UK !!! Today, I run a "fake" serial port modem line from my Gigabit over Ethernet IP home phone system to the IBM PS/2 model-80 tower which THINKS its a normal Hayes 2400 Baud Smartmodem system! Can you say ATDT in order to connect ???

It's used for fun by a bunch of old-timer hardware and software engineers using an old 1980's-era OS/2 BBS system that does post-and-reply messaging! You post a reply and A FEW ***DAYS*** LATER you would eventually get some replies and you would post another reply to the original question. NO instant text messaging here! I think our "online" conversations are higher quality because we have to THINK longer and harder about our questions and answers. Again, this is done for fun as sort of a virtualized late-Sunday-night or mid-week beer-sipping convos about ANYTHING and everything for a bunch of late-work-life, semi-retired and fully-retired engineers gabbing around a digital firepit.

Back in the heyday of local Calgary BBS'es, there were home setups that had 64-phone lines coming into a suburban HOUSE that were quite inexpensive to run even under AGT business rates! Membership fees were typically a yearly membership ($80 CDN) or a monthly $6 to $10 CDN a month where you could pick from a MASSIVE TEXT MENU of downloadable files and subjects ranging from programming source code to imagery and scientific stuff to esoteric subject matter! I think the whole BBS era ran from about 1983 to about 1994 when the first ADSL modems came out and dial-up just died right-out except for rural and deep suburban places that could NOT get high-speed internet! I had 10 Megabits per second ADSL in 1994 with AGT in Calgary and 10 Gigabits Per Second Fibre-based Internet now with Telus in Metro Vancouver in 2025! That shows just how fast Ethernet Frames and TCP/IP packet speeds have increased in just a few decades! If I want to, Telus now offers 100 Gigabit fibre to the home in some parts of Vancouver!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Re: The ghost of Intergalactic Digital past

YUP! You are correct! The BIOS was teh first attempt at hardware virtualization! Anyone remember the great BIOS battles over Phoenix and AMI (American Megatrends International) clones versus the IBM BIOSes?

I still have a LOT of DOS code with low-level INT 13 and INT 21 interrupt-based code running. Windows 10/11/12 maps the interrupt calls to virtualized functions now BUT you can STILL call the BIOS if you need to emulate or call old code! Serial and Parallel Port communications, disk operations, memory mapping all used fancy interrupt calls!

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Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Not actually me but back in the day as young-uns, we was all WITNESS to a very major emergency IT event where a well-degreed IT wizard was on call while out at a club and was REQUIRED to attend any IT emergency no matter the place or time, especially when a C-suite exec phoned! They were even equipped with special giant brick phones that were specifically assigned to the IT department that were always on 24/7.

Being close to summer, when it was both very warm weather-wise and where "Party Time" in the local clubs was in full play, SHE was a late twenties IT wizard very well versed in Unix and Windows Server systems. Of course, it was the one night where she was out at 1:00 am in a club in full party/dance attire dressed to the nines in the most revealing skin-tight clothing and blondest hair one could possibly imagine, and she was pinged to immediately come into the office with no diversions allowed! It also HELPED she was built like a tank with EVERYTHING showing in their MOST SPECTACULAR AMPLITUDE and utter hotness! She turned half the C-suite exec team who raced over to figure out WHY a major electrical and IT infrastructure went down, into a gaggle of STUNNED C*%$#s giving a most delightful view of every personal asset known to womankind!

It was a DELIGHTFUL ten hours to watch all this play out in real-time! She and her team fixed EVERYTHING and we onsite nerd-turd lackeys enjoyed watching every moment of it! Not a male member of us could stand up from their seat afterwards due to a painful, if well-noted men's-folk connotation. Days later she and her team received major commendations in a company newsletter and a big monetary bonus for their efforts that resulted in a significant corporate cost-savings.

My young heart was also crushed a few months later when I found out she was now DATING one of those same senior executives who was at the IT emergency after leaving the company for greener climes AND I was further dismayed/crushed that she eventually married him and had a few children with him. Last I heard via the old-timers IT grapevine was that they were still married after 30+ years but are now both well-off and fully-retired living somewhere warm in south-coastal France. Oh Well! Meh!

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Boom's XB-1 jet nails supersonic flight for first time

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

Here! I will give you a hint .... I have PHOTOS (one of which I took MYSELF with it's glorious high-rez photo hanging on my office wall!) of "The Green Lady" (i.e. a ZIP-fuel aka Boranes powered) Hypersonic aircraft flying since 1996. Then there is "Spearfisher" which is a 15,000 MPH (Mach 27) hypersonic running since 2003 in testing and in operation since 2006 --- Which just flew over France scaring air traffic control a few weeks ago on the way to various middle-east locales but mostly does the East Asia/Russia/NK/China recon run. There's is also the SR-75 aka "Senior Citizen" and "Brilliant Buzzard" aircraft which is the parasite spaceplane and giant XB-70-like carrier aircraft running since 1987 in testing and operational since 1989. And we have the now almost 50 year old design "The Pumpkin Seed" which is a flattened rugby ball shaped near-space plane having various engine type configurations and running operationally since the 1980's and in testing since the 1970's!

Add in "The Silent Ones" Electrostatics, the GWASER-powered deep-dark-black triangles and "The Giant Flying Propane Tanks" and that is about $70+ Billion USD over 40 years worth of research and development at TS:SCI (SAP/CAP) levels of secrecy! Some of these I have ACTUAL PHOTOS of from my secretive expensive-alcohol-and-steak-infused internal sources and ME taking a few of the photos myself! So there! I was being sarcastic FOR A REASON! A lot these designs are 30+ years old and in OPERATION since the 1980's!

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StargateSg7 Bronze badge

LOL! Where have I seen THIS super-duper-ultra-secretive now-almost-30 year old supersonic aircraft design before? LOL HA HA!

This is soooooo OOOOOOOOLD that I should eat a chocolate hat or three to calm my laughter!

Nobody important uses these designs anymore for hypersonic planforms! We've moved on to Terahertz waveguide-based Electrotatics propulsion and GWASER-based propulsion systems these days! Why the heck would I need to use WINGS and JET ENGINES to fly anymore? We got MUCH BETTER technology than this antiquated hunk of 30+ year old junk!

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Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

StargateSg7 Bronze badge

There is the more-than-slight-issue where Ulbricht TRIED to get a low-level drug dealer in White Rock, British Columbia, Canada MURDERED by trying to pay what turned-out-to-be a fake 1% Biker gang member to do a targeted hit and Ulbricht either got scammed himself OR it was an actual undercover RCMP operation (Royal Canadian Mounted Police -- i.e. Canada's version of the FBI) that tried to use a cryptocurrency to fund said Assassination/Targeted hit as a form of "entrapment". The fact that Ulbricht INITIATED the murder attempt shows HIS INTENT to commit a heinous crime and that should NOT have been pardoned! That's a 150 to 20 year sentenced right there just for that!

Ulbricht is NOT an innocent man! He is a wanna-be murderer AND was an operator of website that traded in illicit goods and services. While his EARLIEST intention at a Silk Road marketplace was probably INTENDED to be a libertarian attempt at a free and open digital marketplace, the fact that there IS EVIDENCE of his attempted murder upon a "fellow drug dealer" definitely should have factored further in his pardon by Trump but was not!

It should probably be noted that his 11 years in federal U.S. custody WAS NO PICNIC and U.S. prison conditions are beyond-harsh making even the worst UK prison look like a North London Horse & Hound Country Club! Let's just say he's been "Stretched Out" more than just a few times by the larger, stronger and more violent prisoners while in U.S. Federal Prison custody! He's been aching a heck of lot for 11 years in places where the sun don't shine!

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