Posts by Gary Stewart 714 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jul 2020
Ah, sockets I remember them well. Unfortunately the "socketed" memory due to modern IC packaging would have to be some form of memory module. Since there is no standard SBC memory module specification it would probably increase the price. Using standard laptop SO-DIMMs might help keep the prices down but they are large compared to most SBCs. I'm not sure how much the new CAMM2 laptop memory module would help with that.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1. After spending a great deal of my professional career doing assembly language programming I came to the conclusion long ago that being obsessive/compulsive is a definite plus. I'm just not sure if I was obsessive/compulsive to begin with or if assembly language drove me to it. I believe that it was the latter. Having spent the rest of my career, at least when not doing hardware design, programming in C I came to the conclusion that while not absolutely necessary, it is within a hair's breadth of being required there too.
Getting a little closer to the topic at hand, rising memory prices affect AI too and one has to wonder given the massive amounts of memory, processors, energy, and water needed if there will be enough money left over for profits. And what will happen if there is not.
All this comes as no surprise. I remember when many years ago the navy "lost" 240 ships, they had no idea where they were. The US military and its best buds the military industrial complex and most members of congress has for decades been the top US agency for waste, fraud and abuse. They have failed 7 audits in a row and promise to pass one if I remember correctly in 2029, good luck with that. So why did DOGE dodge them completely? Could it be the at minimum $6 billion in military contracts that Elon's companies (mostly SpaceX but there are others) have? Waste? Fraud? Abuse?
"These changes from Qualcomm only affect the Arduino Cloud Service. The Term changes only apply specifically to the service alone, which is an entirely optional service and not a core part of the hardware/software project."
Did you miss this part?
"Further digging to verify my stance here led me to find a crucial piece of information that I think lends a lot of needed context to what's happening.
These changes from Qualcomm only affect the Arduino Cloud Service. The Term changes only apply specifically to the service alone, which is an entirely optional service and not a core part of the hardware/software project.
These legal changes look more like the standard SaaS legal language we see from other cloud providers and services.
Im even less worried now."
So for now I'll wait to see whats really up with the new license before I jump to conclusions. I certainly hope this commenter is right.
Been (mostly) AMD since the original Athlon. Mostly because of the past and even present lack of availability of AMD notebooks. I have one now but had to go with HP to get a good one, I was actually able to increase the RAM and SSD capacities myself. What a concept! As you may have guessed I do not like HP at all but some times you've got to do what you've got to do and after three years I have zero complaints with the laptop.
AI has lead to huge increases in the price of SDRAMs and SSDs for everybody. AI has huge power requirements that will overwhelm just about every power grid where they are currently slated for installment. All hail Colossus the Elon project and all its predecessors.
AI certainly has promise to revolutionize the areas of computing, research, and everyday use that require massive processing of huge data sets that can produce real world results. This does not in any way require intelligence which is good because AIs don't have any. But in it's current form it is also fully capable of GIGO on a legendary scale. So could somebody please find a better i.e. more efficient on all fronts and less hallucinatory way to do AI? You will almost certainly be richly rewarded.
To the 20 down votes, it wasn't a misstatement it was a blatant lie. As you well know it was Boeing who put that piece of crap capsule in space and was trying desperately to save face by not having it's prime competitor pull it's ass out of the fire, NASA who didn't want any more that the current 17 dead astronauts (21 if you count training deaths), and SpaceX who had to figure out how to schedule a rescue with an already fully full schedule that made the decision not "the Biden administration". You would think that after all the times the Trump regime used that lie to cover it's own ass that it could not have to been "mistaken" as a misunderstanding.
Hey, you can't say that about the most security minded government in American history! How can you even imagine to get any better than Donald "secure bathroom" Trump, hey lets spread the signal app around White House National Security Adviser Michael Waltz (featuring Vice-President JD Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and of course some rando journalist by the name of Jeffrey Goldberg), or doubling up with Pete "tell the wife, lawyer, and others" Hegseth? We still have no idea other than some leaked Israeli secrets hat really pissed them off as to what Don told Russia, Russia, Russia during his first and now second regimes. And who can forget the recorded conversation at Mar a Lardo where he shows anybody that happened to be near top secret war plans and even tells them that it is illegal for him to have them and to be showing them off to just any old Tom, Dick, and Harry. Recently leaked document from the FBI I believe stated that anybody other than Trump would have been arrested immediately after the Mar a Lardo search. No shit Sherlock. So in essence CISA is about as useful as the proverbial screen door in a submarine (hows that for a leaky reference) with the past and present Trump regimes.
On the second part of my first job the Fairchild Sentry IC testers I maintained used 1/2" 9 channel mag tape to load the test programs onto a ~3 foot diameter hard disk, capacity unknown, that used a pneumatic actuator to lift the heads in case of emergency. I always wondered what would happen if one of the disks "got loose". So I've repaired more than a few tape drives in my time. Three of the four testers also used magnetic memory. Luckily for me my digital electronics courses (graduated from Jr. College with an Associates Degree in 1978) actually included magnetic memories which I also had to repair on more than one occasion. Now, get off my lawn!
Been using Devuan since the beginning. Devuan will install GRUB but it can be a real pain in the ass. The biggest problem I've encountered is due to UEFI and GRUB being very picky about the EFI/UEFI directory partition type and this has caused me serious problems when installing or fixing GRUB on Devuan. I have gotten it to install but I've gone back and forth between GParted and fdisk and have yet to discover the "magic bullet" sequence that produces the partition type it wants consistently. Making things worse is that fdisk can produce a partition type that GParted doesn't recognize, BIOS boot I think. All I know for sure is the one that works shows up in GParted as fat32 with boot,esp flags set. Trying to go into further detail is useless because as I said after multiple, multiple attempts I haven't figured out how to do it consistently yet. This problem is seriously exacerbated when trying to set it up for dual boot with Linux Mint which when installed doesn't ask whether or not to install GRUB like it use to but just overwrites my working setup. I have been able to eventually get it to work on multiple computers but it has become the most intensive, time consuming, and annoying part of the installs by a huge margin. And even after documenting my attempts I have been unable to get it to work on the first try having to revert once again to multiple attempts.
However, my biggest complaint about Devuan is that it hasn't officially supported the Raspberry Pi for several years if ever and the unofficial port hasn't been upgraded since 2021. This is a major failing on the development team's part and has caused me great consternation with a couple of very small footprint projects. Trying to use a systemd "init" distribution has proven to be much more trouble than it is worth. This usually comes in the form of not being able to easily or even at all enable or disable things I do not need which are very easy to do with sysv init. One quick example is being able to turn off the normal video console command line interface when I want to use a serial only one. Found lots of web articles/blogs on how to turn it on, but none on to how to turn it off. There are others and I have spent way too much time investigating how to/not to do them with systemd. One of my more important projects, a portable NFS server has been stuck for several months now as I have tried various other non-systemd distributions and have yet to find one that works like I need it to for various reasons.
The proposed $1 trillion Tesla salary for Musk might have helped. $1 trillion has the stupidity dial turned up to 111. If the US was smart enough (it once was, long ago and far away) they would tax Elon for half of that and make a discernible dent in the national debt with no discernible difference to him.
"I'm not American but I think it's great that Trump is getting investment up at home"
According to Trump, $12 trillion in investments with some countries "pledging" multiples of their yearly GDP. Anybody remember Foxxconn (2018)? So bolder of salt required. Not according to more believable sources. US manufacturing is down and it will take years to build the "promised" factories needed. Of course some of the investments he claims as his were started well before he became president, thus bolder of salt although I long ago got to the salt mine required phase. See Build Back America for further details.
Watch just about any interview with the MAGA faithful and you just might figure out why they strive mightily to accomplish low esteem. That they even believe Trump in the first place is a telling indicator.
While what you say is completely correct, you should not downplay the contributions of other outstanding research programs at Bell Labs, Xerox, and numerous university research programs. Another 20 seconds googling on each of these will give equally impressive results. Sadly as you say groundbreaking R&D has been mostly if not completely abandoned by corporations who somehow fail to recognize that these efforts were at the forefront of their commercial empires and profits. Equally sad is the current US regime's massive effort to extort or shut down multiple university's research efforts because "woke".
No, I've seen quite a few good agreements over the years, trade and otherwise although you are not entirely wrong about anywhere from lax to nonexistent enforcement of some agreements. On the other hand some have been adhered to without problems, all of the above mainly due to as you say the politics of the prevailing party in power looking to remain in power. Then there is the Trump regime lead by the master negotiator himself who recently proclaimed when trying to get a new "deal" that the existing trade agreement with Mexico was a complete disaster. I would bet to this day he doesn't know/remember that it was him and his previous administration that negotiated and signed it. Speaking of complete disasters.
No signed agreement which means no way to guaranty or enforce the "deal" and I find it impossible to believe that anybody thinks that Trump or anybody else in his regime is in any way trustworthy. Anybody know WTF S. Korea was thinking about when they gave Moronodon I a crown? Which by the way is clearly a violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause. Well at least his views on the Constitution are consistent.
I still have worries about safe Starship reentry as this is a tremendously difficult engineering problem that they still haven't got a handle on. The damage I've seen in the last two successful reentries has been fairly extensive although they seem to be making progress, slowly. I don't remember seeing anything about this, I should probably pay more attention, but are they intending to have the Lunar lander version attempt reentry or are they going to transfer to an Orion capsule for that? Reentry velocity after returning from the Moon is much greater than LEO velocity and I would be really worried about that.
Yeah, I was temporarily blinded by the idiocy. It comes so fast and furious these days that I have trouble keeping an even keel which occasionally leads to AI hallucinations of normalcy. "“We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway. "
Not all of us. Unfortunately due to an unforeseen massive increase in village idiots (probably due to acetaminophen and circumcision) the senate, house, and the royal executive branch with the full acquiescence of six members of the Supine Court king orange poop bomber (that was a light load for him) holds the good people in the US at bay. For the moment. There have been signs that even some of the most ardent supporters are beginning to have the mere thought of even beginning to speculate about the merest possibility crossing their minds that maybe he's not in it for them after all
Texas republican legislators are actually actively working on making Texas one of, if not the largest AI/server farm centers in the US. Can't wait for another massive Texas winter storm to beat the old record (use very dark humor here that fits with the times to fill in the blank). Not to mention that we usually have very hot summers that regularly come close to and occasionally succeed in maxing out our power grid. Oh and dangerously powerful thunderstorms and tornadoes in the spring that regularly cripple large parts of the power grid for days. Supposedly they will just turn them off the massive compute farms in power emergencies. This seems to contradict the idea of 24/7/365 availability that customers of those services expect or in some cases require. It should be pointed out that there are vast tracts of... land in wind swept wide open semi-arrid west Texas available for alternative energy sources but according to our supreme governor these sources are too unreliable. We could just fire up the boilers on new preferably gas but let's not prematurely count out beautiful clean coal generating plants that will require at least 5 years to build. And help the Gulf of Mexico (FU Trump) to take back all the islands along the coast and some of the coast as well. See I told you, even stupid is bigger in Texas.
"I understand there are plenty of hard problems with Fusion but the main one always seemed to be plasma confinement and control"
Yes, having million+ degree plasma hit the wall of the Tokamak is very problematic and very high temperature plasma tends to be very chaotic on very short time scales. There is at least one other magnetic confinement scheme being experimented with that uses an asymmetric plasma chamber and a complex arrangement of magnets to solve this problem. Personally I'd like to see both of them succeed.
Long time Linux user (1991), I left Windows at 7, never looked back. The only reason I used W7 was for gaming and that came to an abrupt halt when different games wanted different versions of Direct X. W7 didn't like that at all so no more gaming either. Lots of modern motherboards, at least on AM4 MBs, have an integrated keyboard/mouse PS2 connector. I have had problems with a couple of adapters that split out that connector to separate keyboard and mouse connectors not working at all so?
Actually we are officially in daylight savings time until some time in November, at least this time we fall back. Death to springing forward with sharp nasty teeth! No idea what the long form designation is, here we call it CDT for Central Daylight Time. After we fall back it will be CST for Central Standard Time.
Mostly no, but there have been some serious exceptions. See the secret bombings and invasions of Cambodia and Laos, Watergate, and Iran-Contra just off the top of my head. Anybody noticing a pattern here? If you have something of equal disregard for the law and the Constitution please add them. I have witnessed them all and nothing, absolutely nothing compares to the blatant, in your face and up your ass lawlessness and corruption of the current regime. The hypocrisy of crying about imagined weaponization from the previous administration compared to the openly obvious weaponization by the current regime is enough to make any sane person long for at least two (see no evil, hear no evil) of the three monkey solution.
And don't add any of the "lawfare" Bovine Squeezings from the most prolific liar in US political history. Trump was caught red handed hiding stolen documents, some of them classified. He tried to extort Ukraine to manufacture dirt or at least to say they were investigating a rival candidate and the State of Georgia to "find" more votes (did anybody other than JD check out the couch cushions?). He tried and failed to block the lawful transfer of power using violent and hateful rhetoric to incite the violence that did occur*, and he was indited and convicted by UNANIMOUS votes in the grand jury and trial jury of 34 felony counts. All of these have ample evidence to convict him on all charges. At yet here he sits on his golden throne squeezing out more greasy black venom as he types his incoherent babblings and unlawful edicts onto the internet causing untold havoc across the entire United States. Aided and abetted by his gaggle of nobhopper "republicans" in congress, the Supine Court, and the 10's of millions of MAGAs that support him as they all sing in unison, "owning the libs, winning, winning, winning, please sir may I have another". So far we are holding on only by the hair on our chinny chin chins, I guess now was a bad time to shave my beard.
* the "go peacefully" so often used to lie about his rhetoric on that day occurred almost three hours after it started. Before the beginning it was "fight like hell".
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