* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Endeavour: donuts and a Toyota ease shuttle's drive through L.A.

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Pint

Don't miss the link to the Discovery Flight deck

As provided by El Reg:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121012-space-shuttle-endeavour-los-angeles-international-airport-science/

And buried in the text:

http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/spaceflight-hd/gigapan-discovery-flight-deck/

I don't know why its 'sciency' though. Clearly, it's engineering, and government-provided, cold-war era at that. It's as impressive as a good old greasy, dirty, temperamental and dangerous steam locomotive. Which is quite a lot.

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Trollface

Re: Is Toyota now an American company, then?

The UAW isn't too strong at Toyata. Maybe it's not an "American Company" in that sense?

It also makes money.

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Thumb Up

Dr. Hans Reinhardt, I presume?

> It's definitely worth a few minutes of your panning, zooming attention.

Holy damn, that looks a lot like a small version of the the Cygnus control room.

It's actually sad that you cannot actually "go anywhere" with all that beauty because ... no Delta-V.

"Punch it!"

"I'm sorry, there is no lever for that!"

Why is solid-state storage so flimsy?

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Re: never mind disc vs disk, why are we still calling it a "drive"?

It's a DRIVE as long as it goes via the DRIVE INTERFACE.

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Re: nonsense article

I certainly hope your are the guy shifting the material in the backrooms and not giving out advice to customers.

Don't lose anything, now.

Übertroll firm bags DRM patent for 3D printing

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Stop

Re: On the otherhand this could be a good thing

That was back then. This is now.

DVD is a product of the 70s/80s mindset - centrally controlled, with "content producers" on one hand, and "consumers" on the hand. The "content producers" would impose their idea of what's permissible on the reader device maufacturers, and that would be that - a closed system to pump movies to the consumers under tight supervisions. So tight in fact that they went so far as to have "region codes". Yes, the world would be balkanized with content staying in each cell. How MBA-carrying retarded can you be? Of course, politicians and lawmakers enable this kind of bilking (then call it a "free market with consistent IP protection") and one should apply the Mongols' idea of using of a large plank and several horses for good effect on these people, but I digress...

What I am saying is, 3D printing is nothing special. No special "disk format" for interoperability, no special file format, no special filesystem. In 2012, people know how to create open, interoperable descriptions (if need by in XML) that can be exchanged on USB sticks or downloaded/uploaded. The situation is totally different. Competing devices will be made interoperable by software conversion. Those that don't want to play ball and DRM everything will either die of find a niche among buyers that have more money than good sense.

'Stop-gap' way to get Linux on Windows 8 machines to be issued

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Stop

CALLING EL REG

Instead of potentially inflammatory not too clear articles [and the readership being utterly confused / in thrall to confirmation bias as evidenced by the comment section] how about setting up an UEFI/SIGNED BOOTLOADER FAQ to clarify this controversy somewhat?

Just a thought.

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Linux

Re: disable secure boot on non-ARM platforms

> People who honestly prefer to see Linux beaten down so they can complain about that

Linux Liberals!

Solid info though, thank you.

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Trollface

Re: I would comment, but...

I hereby insult you!!

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Holmes

Re: Here We Go Again

Yes we got that...? Mais encore?

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Holmes

> Penguins have been clamoring that this locks them out because of the GNU and other licences that require them to be "open" which secure boot is not.

NOPE. Do you hear "penguins clamoring"? Are we in Antarctica? No.

What happens is that the bootloader has to be signed [by someone who owns the private key the public counterpart of which is on the motherboard]. Apparently this is MANDATORY on ARM machines for some reason.

This as far as I can see has nothing to do with GNU licensing.

It has to do with someone [who?] going to the keyholder guy [who owns the private key the public counterpart of which is on the motherboard] with a compiled version of GRUB2, then asking nicely whether he would like to sign this binary thank you very much and can we come back once the next bugfix release is due.

Now the keyholder guy may want to get paid or the outfit which manages the certificate chain involved might. Apparently in this case the latter is Verisign and someone [who?] will come up with the cash.

Vote NOW for the vilest Bond villain

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Devil

Re: Franz Sanchez - Most realistic, most violent

The guy is now in charge...

http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_21389331/even-more-brutal-leader-takes-over-mexicos-zetas

MEXICO CITY (AP) - A falling out between the leaders of the hyper-violent Zetas cartel appears to have put the gang in the hands of a brutal and feared gangster who has been blamed for an eruption of bloodshed in Mexico's once relatively calm central states. Miguel Angel Trevino Morales is a former cartel enforcer who apparently won a showdown with Zetas founder Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano for leadership, law enforcement officials say. Lawmen and even competing drug capos picture Trevino as a brutal assassin who favors getting rid of foes by stuffing them into oil drums, dousing them with gasoline and setting them on fire - a practice known as a "guiso," a Spanish word for "stew."

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Holmes

Re: Blofeld

What about Corinne Dufour then? It was all KILL THE CUTIE. Sob!

I just noticed Corinne also starred in "Story of O". Ah-HA!

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Devil

Re: Where's Renard?

Slav-looking evil, actually from the UK.

Beds Sophie Marceau (HNGGG!!)

Holds Plutonium with bare hands (ok, that's not hard to do).

Nonchalantly poisons his country fellows.

ALL MY POINTS!

Small biz scrappers urged to take the fight to hackers

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Devil

"not be a form of vigilantism"

Written as if that were a bad thing. Definitely better than to assume the party escort submission position and wait for the guys in blue.

And I cite Wendy McElroy:

"Officials in the UK, as everywhere, pronounce the word vigilante with intonations of horror and disgust. To them, a vigilante represents 'society gone askew' every bit as much as the looter who smashes open windows, because both men constitute a basic denial of the officials' authority. No wonder the police are eager to portray those who protect their own persons and property as 'lynch mobs' or otherwise threats to civil society. If a trend toward self-defense were encouraged, after all, then the police might be out of a job; the authorities might be out of power. And so, vigilante is a good word that has 'gone bad,' largely because the authorities fear its virtues."

Microsoft sues Google directly in German Maps-on-Moto lawsuit

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Mushroom

I think trolls do need a good kicking, perhaps then they would stop trolling others.

Unrootable: Mash these bits together to get a CLASSIFIED spyphone

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Meh

I suspect this addy should be accompanied by a "Blue Men" flash

....but I have NoScript turned on.

Flashboys: HEELLLP, we're trapped in a process size shrink crunch

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Paris Hilton

"It works who cares"

The paper raises interesting legitimate questions.

So does it really work, or is the understanding of what a "memristor" is different between the theoreticians and experimentalists (or between inside HP and outside HP) or is this a Cold Fusion device? Is suppose in the end, the Real Stuff won't be a "passive device"...

We read:

"In With regard to equation (34), the dynamical state equation (31b) would thus violate Landauer’s

principle as there is no restriction with respect to the minimum amount of energy which is needed to attain to an internal, physical state change. Following equation (31b), one would be able to change the state of a system – and that means in our case a real physical modification – at any time by merely feeding some electric current through the system, independent of the energy or work which can be actually supplied to the system in course of time. However, internal states of a system can only be altered if some minimum amount of generalized thermodynamic work is involved in, and that holds for both macroscopic and nanoscopic systems. Reasoning thoroughly about all of this, the dynamical state equation (31b) for our hypothetical memristor violates thus the fundamental requirements of the thermodynamics of information processing by itself. Maybe, approaches like the state equations (31a) and (31b) might be maintained if an extra side condition for the considered system is specified, namely the minimum electric power input to the device which is necessary to arrive continuously at internal, physical state changes, but we have reasonable doubts with regard to this. Physically, one might be confronted with capacitive or inductive effects, but it is beyond the scope of the present work to discuss such thinkable systems."

Yale finds second diamond planet

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Obligatory XKCD planets image: http://xkcd.com/1071/

I should really be doing my boring webapp...

Cisco lobbied telco customers to steer clear of Huawei

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Devil

Cisco Livery Astroturf!

So we still don't know whether Huawei has links to the {Party|Red Army|Other PRC Power Center}, but know that Cisco is very likely indeed to have links to {Congress|Senate|Military|FTC|Other US Power Center}.

Oy!

Is lightspeed really a limit?

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Megaphone

Re: Slow

> The speed of light does seem rather slow, cosmically speaking.

It has exactly the value it needs: 1

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Facepalm

Oh the huge manatee!

> Labs are boring some people have a life.

Translation: Too dumb to learn. Will watch Lindsay's arse instead.

> Either way, speculation is all we have at this point

Yes, you are on Youtube.

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Devil

Re: we have yet to understand light

Why are so many cranks emerging in this thread, seemingly from before the french revolution considering their state of knowledge of contemporary physics and Lorentz boost operators?

Has someone opened a Portal by testing FTL devices again??

IGOR!!!!

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Alien

The VERY short answer... photons don't need to know, they just try it all

1) Check out Feynman's books on QED (there is one for the lay public and one called "Feynman Path Integrals" or something). The idea:

You "just" need to add the complex amplitudes (at the target) of EVERY POSSIBLE PATH that a photon might take from source to the target. Square the value, which gives you a classical probability density function. A photon will be detected according to this PDF.

Everything (shortest path through spacetime, diffraction, refraction, Heisenberg uncertainty, interference, the works) can be explained by this simple principle - use EVERY POSSIBLE PATH (also the fractal ones - especially the fractal ones, though Feynman didn't know about that adjective, I think - and even the ones going faster-than-light, to the edge of the universe and back) AND SUM OVER THEM. For every photon. There are exponentially more paths in case you have more particles. Tremendous computational capability in this universe, wouldn't you think (but sadly NP-hard problems stay unsolvable even so)

2) In classical mechanics, you have the "Lagrangian formalism" which gives you the path an object takes through (flat) spacetime by requiring that INTEGRATION OVER TIME OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KINETIC ENERGY AND POTENTIAL ENERGY SHALL YIELD AN EXTREMUM. Simple as that. And it works bombers. Time disappears and the classical trajectories are simple solutions of a minimization procedure. Great stuff! (not so great that it would allow you do NP-hard problems efficiently though)

What does it all mean? Nobody knows.

Apple files disappearing-feature iPhone patent

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Trollface

Holy stuff!

Clearly, the apes in 2001 didn't know about "slide to unlock".

Experts split over regulation for bounty-hunting bug sniffers

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Big Brother

Bad money drives out the good, etc.

Note to "regulators":

You can only "regulate" what you can actually SEE.

And even then, "regulation" is generally abysmal, counterproductive, uneconomical, unethical and probably transforming the "seen" into the "unseen".

Reds in the Routers is routine, not rare

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Holmes

Re: Sound and Fury

The Internet is full of 'tards, no surprise here.

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Holmes

Re: So how about...

> Making an education offensive.

Why do you want to have offensive education?

> Make it affordable for people to study engineering.

I don't think that the price tag of engineering curricula or the current skill set is much of a problem.

It's just that stuff from <whatever far eastern company> can - at the present time - be had at a better price than if it was produced locally. Which of course is A-OK, because that means you don't need to shell out $$$ for your kit and can invest it in something else.

It is of course true that this only happens because the US can print up money at will [or else promise tax revenues from the future] for continued infinite imports. This is not A-OK. Take that away and prices might very well balance at some time.

Btw, an economic system does not allow you to "make it affordable" just like that. That's like demanding that the solution to your differential equation should have a certain shape. It doesn't work like that. Something has to give.

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Trollface

Re: If ever they were found out...

So the Chinese are crazy prepared, is that it?

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Trollface

Re: Some of us build our own routers ...

> using off-the-shelf parts

Sourced from China. Not that I take this latest US moral panic seriously.

Upcoming: Wahabbis and Salafists in our oil, ZOMG! After this message...

Steelie Neelie: Settle your Do-No-Track squabbles or else

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Holmes

Re: Apache change commented out

> How do you misuse something that is not a standard as yet?

If it's ready for implementation, it's standardized enough.

But I still don't see why he went all postal on this.

I don't see where the problems are either. IMHO, the "cookie" debacle is just political grandstanding that muddies the issues. "Do not track" means that you are telling a reputable service to throw away data ASAP (i.e. once the session closes or a small timeout has been reached) and to not communicate said data to 3rd party services while held. What could be simpler?

If you are connecting to a disreputable service, DNT will do bugger all, but then you still have "private browsing".

Wanted! 4m-plus PC purchases to halt industry decline

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Devil

THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN PIANO INDUSTRY

By William Braid White. The American Mercury, February 1933, pp. 210-213 (some selective quoting)

"During the last century the piano has obtained a position of almost complete dominance over the art of music. That is because it combines two properties that are not to be found in the same combination in any other instrument. On the one hand, its player can instantly and directly control the loudness of the tones he evokes, while on the other the keyboard which he manipulates gives him command over the entire range of sounds used in music, through seven octaves and a minor third, from the lowest A at 27.5 vibrations a second to the highest C at 4186. He commands every harmony within the scope of his ten fingers; and if he be sufficiently skilful he can even expand this scope by combining rapid skips over the keyboard with a judicious use of the pedal. Many musical instruments, in fact, nearly all, endow their players with the first of these powers. Some, like the organ, give him the second. But only the piano gives both, immediately and directly. Moreover, the piano is the easiest to play of all the more important instruments. It is this combination of powers within a comparatively small physical size that has brought it to the front of the musical art. But today that position is seriously threatened....

With some external refinements, cheap uprights soon began to appear also in the cities. With their appearance came the instalment system of purchase, already known to buyers of the cheaper lines of furniture. Considering that the retail price of a fairly good upright was in those days about 1250 and that $15 a week was a good salary for a clerical worker, it is easy to see how the instalment system became a necessity. Very quickly the cheap upright became the money maker of the industry. The number of manufacturers increased year by year, until at the end of the century some 300 were listed. Many of them were turning out what were unkindly called thump-boxes, that is to say, large, cheaply constructed uprights, poor in tone and poorer in mechanism. Why they were bought at all is still something of a mystery. For the American middle class was no more musical then than it is now, and the number of persons who could play the piano was proportionately no larger than it is today. Yet everybody wanted an upright, and 250,000 were sold each year from 1900 to 1910....

Cheap upright player-pianos soon came on the market, with the playing mechanisms built in. Within a few years after 1905 they were leading all other kinds of piano in output, and had become in their turn the big money makers. The apex of their popularity came during the war-time boom of 1916-19. Almost immediately thereafter this received, suddenly and unexpectedly, a fatal wound, by the emergence of public radio broadcasting. For twenty years, under the feet of thousands of wholly unmusical men, women and hildren, up and down the land, the player-piano had been emitting terrible caricatures of piano music. But there was no longer need for it when better music, in every style, could be had from a radio set.

The number of pianos made and sold annually in the United States has been declining steadily for six years, nor has the process yet been checked. The effect of this decline has been two-fold. In the first place, it has revealed clearly what has always been realized by a few, namely, that the American people were never really musical, but bought pianos during many years only because their possession was a sign of social respectability. The position which the instalment-bought piano once occupied in this respect has now been assumed by the automobile."

Ballmer's lightened pay packet is the least of his problems

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Thumb Down

Re: Developer's perspective

Nothing surpasses Skeletor!

Amazon UK leaks Windows 8 retail box, TV ads

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Trollface

Or better yet...

"Emmanuel Goldstein in a Box."

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Terminator

Re: Upgrade Edition

Clearly, you are a Cylon.

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Alien

Re: im going to rush out and get it on release day

No, you just yum update

Russian Christians boosted by Pussy Riot law spank 'sinful' Apple logo

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Holmes

Re: Russia

> Implying that the USA or Russia have a "free market"

> Implying that the end result of capitalism is Saudi Arabia

> Implying that "Science" is pure and unadulterated and a grounding force. Lyssenko or Nazi doctors may want to chat with you.

> Implying that anyone even knows who Paul Broun is or that people are bothered by the crud they elect.

Really now.

Someone once said with a bit too much flourish:

"Capitalism demands the best of every man — his rationality — and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him. His success depends on the objective value of his work and on the rationality of those who recognize that value. When men are free to trade, with reason and reality as their only arbiter, when no man may use physical force to extort the consent of another, it is the best product and the best judgment that win in every field of human endeavor, and raise the standard of living—and of thought—ever higher for all those who take part in mankind’s productive activity. ....

In this complex pattern of human co-operation, two key figures act as the twin-motors of progress, the integrators of the entire system, the transmission belts that carry the achievements of the best minds to every level of society: the intellectual and the businessman. ....

It is on this fundamental division of labor and of responsibility that the intellectual has defaulted. His twin brother, the businessman, has done a superlative job and has brought men to an unprecedented material prosperity. But the intellectual has sold him out, has betrayed their common source, has failed in his own job and has brought men to spiritual bankruptcy. The businessman has raised men’s standard of living—but the intellectual has dropped men’s standard of thought to the level of an impotent savage."

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Holmes

I draw you a Mohammed!!

> Just adapt to people whose values are different from your own.

I have no intention to adapt to people whose value is being professionally offended in the name of $DEITY and who go out of their way to tell me about it in no uncertain terms. I would rather use a daisy cutter on them.

ICO tries to justify hefty NHS data breach fines

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Holmes

Re: Public vs Private

There is also the problem of "dark matter" - losses undetected that went into the heat sink (a USB stick in the trash being carried off for incineration) - losses undetected that went into someone's toolset (a USB stick falling victim to dumpster diving).

"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.

There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don't know.

But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know."

If Rumsfeld is to be remember for anything except asshattery, this should be it.

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Holmes

Re: bah

It's also a nice illustration of what is called the economic calculation problem in a socialistic outfit. You don't know how much anyone would pay for your service. You don't know what service to provide. You don't know how much to invest where. You don't know your pay levels. You can, however, demand more money from the taxpayer by wailing enough.

In a rational economic actor, what would happen is that there would be an evaluation of whether to invest in business re-engineering for more data protection [which means shifting resources away from what people pay for in the first place] or whether to incur the risk of being fined by ICO if case SHTF [which means shifting resources away from what people pay for in the first place]. Assign a price to each eventuality. Take the cheapest.

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Thumb Down

You want standards? There are truckloads. Who is going to implement them? How many years will it take? How many contractors do you need? Take them from EDS? PwC? Repeat every year or every two years? Train existing personnel for two weeks ... need more personnel etc. etc. etc.

The economic calculations are NOT trivial.

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Re: Public vs. Private

> Actually, when you think about it

Well, it's worse with the public outfit. They also have a contract (it's "the law" and stuff) that is imposed (did you sign something? no) on you and you have no particular choice about handing over your data

> And we all know that companies are taking the data for explicit commercial gain, rather than (for example) trying to make people better.

Do you really think that what you say makes any sense at all?

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Re: Public vs Private

> Unlikely.

Why?

Gavel fails to fall for Apple 1

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Windows

Re: Too right, typical Apple

I remember the 16 bit machines...

Amiga 2000, 1987 (Motorola 68000 @ 7.14 MHz, 512 KiB): USD 1'500

Mac II, 1987 (Motorola 68020 @ 15 MHz, 1 MiB): USD 3'769

Good times, good times... somebody had an acoustic coupler ....

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Devil

Yep

Like the Necronomicon, it's damn ancient. Unlike the Necronomicon, it doesn't reveal forbidden knowledge.

Now, was Jobs in the same league as Abdul al Hazred? Some rumors say yes...

ISS crew fling out arm, grab SpaceX Dragon capsule

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Trollface

Bad taste in decoration?!

Shouldn't there be a stencil of Ayn Rand's likeness on the capsule instead of the flag of some failed state?

SpaceX Falcon 9 flameout leaves commercial satellite in wrong orbit

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Re: We can only hope

> The physics such as they are seem sound

END OF LINE

Sarah Brightman plans International Space Station gig

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Unhappy

STEM again?

> close the gender gap in the STEM

This is actually done by more females taking up STEM subjects, not by warbling from LEO.

Odds are not good...

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Holmes

You don't quite understand how central banking works.

Big Blue bigwig: Tiny processor knobs can't shrink forever

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Holmes

Re: limits are made to be broken...

Of course, of course. But that means a whole new production and engineering chain, so might well take several decades. Unlike what politicians believe, you cannot just fart whole new approaches out of nothing.

I still remember my amazement at this from February 1993 in Communications of the ACM. 4 KW for 250 MHz. My dad was laughing at me and thought I was a retard for believing the power uptake numbers:

"The CPU module contains one microprocessor chip, its external cache, and an interface to the bus. A storage module contains two 32-megabyte (MB) interleaved banks of dynamic random access memory (DRAM). The I/O channels that are connected to one or two DECstation 5000 workstations, which provide disk and network I/O as well as a high-performance debugging environment. Most of the logic, with the exception of the CPU chip, is emitter-coupled logic (ECL), which we selected for its high speed and predictable electrical characteristics. Modules plug into a 14-slot card cage. The card cage and power supplies are housed in a 0.5- by 1.1-meter (m) cabinet. A fully loaded cabinet dissipates approximately 4,000 watts, and is cooled by forced air. Figures 1 and 2 are photographs of the system and the modules.

....

We designed the bus to provide high bandwidth, which is suitable for a multiprocessor system, and to offer minimal latency. As the CPU cycle time becomes very small, 5 nanoseconds (ns) [250 MHz] for the DECchip 21064, the main memory latency becomes an important component of system performance. The ADU bus can supply 320MB of user data, but still is able to satisfy a cache read miss in just 200ns."